


The Kid from Hollywood

by candle_beck



Series: The Kid from Hollywood [2]
Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-10
Updated: 2011-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-24 12:07:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 45,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zito has always been opposed to the forward progression of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kid from Hollywood

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Eric Chavez Goes to Hollywood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/252301) by [candle_beck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck). 



> Originally posted May 2008.

The Kid from Hollywood  
By Candle Beck

 

In the last month of Zito’s twenty-first year, he played for the Sacramento River Cats and developed a sense of how the future would go. All the grace in his life would be constricted to the diamond—all the triumph, all the joy. Pitching would be the only time the sun came out for him, and god knew how he’d survive the off-seasons, the lightless arctic winters.

He was running hot and cold again, uppers and swan-dives, face-first collapses in the early morning hours. A whole new team to learn, guys who were at least starting to approach his level of play, the average dimensions getting progressively bigger the higher up he went, biceps like paint cans and chipped marble physiques that could in no way be natural, which was depressingly par for the course.

Zito was just barely a year into professional baseball, impatient as hell because his life’s single goal was now an hour down the highway, and he’d been ready for years; he could have been like one of those kids drafted out of the Dominican Republic at fourteen and in the majors three years later. When he couldn’t sleep he lay awake thinking about where the A’s were playing, wondering what hotel room ceilings in Cleveland looked like.

He just needed to hold it together long enough to get to the Show. There was some kind of redemption waiting for him in Oakland, a better way to fall.

Mulder was there for the first three weeks, and that was ominous too. They might have a decade of being on the same team in their respective futures, and Zito wasn’t sure if he could manage if Mulder was going to treat him like this, poker-faced and civil with a lace of bitterness that was almost imperceptible, piercing high like a dog whistle.

Mulder wouldn’t admit to anything, didn’t even look like the same person he’d been on the Cape, that stuttering kid with a bad flush and hands that could substitute for wings. He was always put together and sealed up, the giveaway tricks of his eyes somehow iced over—he must have learned in the off-season—untouchable in a way that had nothing to do with his game.

Really drunk, at times certain that he could actually feel the smothering death of his brain cells, the steady encroach of insanity, Zito would get free-form and morose, lying on the floor with his eyes open but unseeing, trying to gauge the weight of evil in him against the scraped-together good.

It was an imprecise science and even blitzed he understood that it was not at all healthy, but that was just one more thing to add to the list.

Zito’s vision became glittery at the edges from sleep deprivation or sensory overload or any of a thousand other perfectly good reasons. He walked out defenseless into a torrential rain that he could have sworn was a hallucination.

Cruel April morning, shaving with epic care and one badly trembling hand guiding the other, he met his bloodshot eyes in the mirror and figured he could probably last about three months at this rate.

*

Towards the end of April, Zito was zoned out in the clubhouse, headphones in and hoodie hood pulled up, but he sensed something anyway, a shift of pieces, the ache of an incoming storm along the surgical scar on his knee.

He slit his eyes open and looked around sneakily. A manic song clashed at the sides of his head, drums like a wall falling down, and Mulder was standing in front of the manager’s office, surrounded by their teammates and shaking every one of their hands.

It was an obvious conclusion, cemented into fact when Mulder extricated himself and started to dismantle his open-faced locker, a helpless grin stuck to his face even though nobody was around him anymore.

Zito was trying to master his more visceral emotional responses, or at least cover them adequately enough for media coverage, but it was hard not to keep the dismay off his face, the disgust. He’d pitched better than Mulder, even though they insisted on making him face inferiors, he’d done everything necessary to immortalize his minor league year. Zito limited himself to the purely objective, the numbers and slow-motion video, and it still stood out like a headline: the wrong left-hander had been called home from Sacramento.

Zito snuck out after the game got underway, camouflaged still in his hood and sunglasses, world-famous hands stuffed in his pockets, and walked two blocks to the 7-Eleven. A blueberry crush Slurpee was liberally spiked from the flask Zito kept in his belt, his mouth brightened and cold, breath sweet and crimes concealed.

Back at the ballpark, Zito went quickly to the clubhouse to change out of his street clothes, but he wasn’t thinking strategically and forgot to make sure no one was there first. He’d already pushed his hood down, his hand alit on his sunglasses, when he saw Mulder all spit-shined and ready to go, his bags in a neat pyramid and his hair slicked forward.

Mulder was ripping the tape with his name on it from off the front of his locker, working it away from the paint. When he had the strip free, he smoothed it onto the back of the old-fashioned wooden clipboard where he kept his game notes. It looked like a ritual, though Zito knew he hadn’t done it in Vancouver, and Mulder had never left anywhere else.

Made brave and sugar-high by the Slurpee leeching feeling from his hand, Zito flicked off his sunglasses and said expansively, “Lookit the movie star.”

Mulder jerked around and knocked his stack of bags over, catching himself on the locker. His face went red like a flipped switch and he opened his mouth a few times without saying anything, humiliated frustration ringing from him and it was just like the first time Zito had spoken to him, through the cobwebs and splintered sunlight.

He covered his mouth so Mulder wouldn’t see him grinning; Mulder wouldn’t take it the way it was intended.

“What’re you doing?” Mulder asked sullenly, ignoring the mess at his feet.

Zito shrugged. “Avoiding my responsibilities.” He waggled the Slurpee cup. “Getting loaded.”

“Those are both givens,” Mulder said with the slightest sneer.

“Don’t expect to get a rise telling me shit I already know, man.”

“I’m not trying to get anything from you.” Mulder snatched one of the bags off the floor and slung it over his shoulder purposefully. “I gotta go.”

“What, no goodbye?” Zito stepped forward, a low pull in his stomach that he couldn’t place. He felt like there was something he should be doing at this moment, something vital he was forgetting.

Mulder gave him a look of disbelief, backlit by the standard wounded resentment, and said without intonation, “Bye.”

The pull in Zito’s stomach tightened into a fist suddenly, thinking that Mulder hated him and even if he didn’t, he was still leaving tonight, and Zito said fast, “What, no kiss?”

Mulder was already half turned away, but his shoulders froze into a still line, shallow angle of his neck, his head bowed. He was motionless for a moment, as if absorbing a blow, and then he whipped around with a curdled snarl on his face. It took the fight out of Zito, tore his throat out and left him speechless.

“If you ever make it,” Mulder said in an unrecognizable voice, his face gnarled and old-looking, “stay the hell away from me.”

He stormed out as well as a person could while carrying his life in three bags, and Zito experienced for the second time an abrupt and debilitating loneliness, last man on earth syndrome. He cast about for something familiar to cling to and found, predictably, a baseball.

*

Zito spent the next two months in freefall, minor league stadiums lit up white like oases on the plains, hotel rooms and railroad bars shuffled like cards, screwed up his sense of continuity. He never knew what day of the week it was or what city he was in, mute with exhaustion trailing the pack of his teammates through lobbies and airport terminals, weaving around diner tables.

It was like the Cold War all over again, eight years old and diving under his desk during drills for earthquakes and air raids, developing an immovable certainty that the world was going to end in a violet flash of light someday, the ash-shadow of his outline forever preserved on a cement wall, and there was no stopping it. There was no sense in living carefully, in staying safe.

When he was a nihilistic pre-adolescent, he’d skateboarded without a helmet, leapt over fifteen feet of rocks into a pure deep blue, mouthed off to his father. By twenty-two years old, his self-destructions had turned almost entirely inward, clawed harrows in places that other people couldn’t see. Nobody up here knew him very well at all.

Zito figured that subconsciously he was probably doing his best to wreck his shot, maybe as penance for a hundred sins, maybe as recompense for his mother, maybe he was just scared. He certainly felt scared.

He’d let things get away from him again, mixed up between dreams of pitching and his actual starts, and so it caught him by surprise when he was called up to play in the major leagues unceremoniously one bug-thick day in July, staring at the wads of dried gum on the side of the phone.

He had to sit down. He must have spent an hour trying to slow his heartbeat, a panicked bird in his chest and his throat shut down like a collapsed mine shaft.

As far back as Zito could remember, his driving motivation had been this moment. Before he’d known his middle name, he’d known that this was where he belonged.

*

His first day in Oakland, Zito fell disastrously in love.

It happened in the time it took the Platonic ideal of a split fastball to become abruptly aware of gravity sixty feet into its flight, like Wile E. Coyote finally looking down. It happened so suddenly that Zito felt it more like a freshly unlocked door than anything foreign. This had always been there, he’d just never seen it.

The splitter belonged to Tim Hudson, and along with it Zito’s heart.

Hudson was a Platonic ideal too, a definitive ballplayer with a prettier swing than the infielders, round tin of dip pressing out his back pocket, military-short hair and a face made for baseball cards and bicycle wheels. He was the overwhelming favorite of just about everyone on the team, plain to see why.

Just being there, his name on the back of the jersey, his little yellow-white jar of Carmex on the locker shelf, it was enough to shiver through Zito every few seconds, the hair on the back of his neck and his arms standing up as the full force of it hit him again and again. He thought it might be years before he could really think about it directly without getting dizzy.

He didn’t need to add a baseless infatuation, didn’t have any interest in such an exponential complication, but there it was. It was a sign from God to stay humble, Zito figured. Don’t ever think you’ve got your life under control.

Miles from comfortable, awkwardly chocked into this team that finished each other’s sentences and communicated with semaphore and private jokes, Zito stuck close to the clubhouse walls, waiting for the crowd to disperse.

There built in him a restlessness, a painfully specific desire as he watched Tim Hudson busily snapping the wrinkles out of his shirt with his back totally exposed. Zito knew almost nothing about him; Hudson didn’t even know Zito’s name yet. Zito tried to come up with an appropriate salutation, an ice-breaker, but all he could think to say was, can I suck you off? Probably that would be counterproductive.

Lost, needing to see something that wasn’t desperate and skewed, needing a ride to the hotel, he skulked into the parking garage and spotted Mulder fussing with a soap spot on his car hood. That had to be a sign too, so Zito snuck up on the shotgun side, crossed his fingers behind his hip and said, “So this is the Show.”

Mulder yanked around, wide eyes crashing into Zito’s. They stared at each other for a second over the shine of the hood, and Zito wondered at what point would Mulder fade into the background, when would he be shook of this.

Mulder looked away first. “They just let anybody in these days, don’t they.”

“You knew I was coming. Didn’t you hear?”

“I guess I did.” Mulder pressed his lips into a seam, a stick-figure’s neutral mouth. “I thought it was a bad joke.”

Zito snorted, half-laughed without much joy. “You wish.”

“It’d rid me of you, wouldn’t it?” Mulder said, a flash of that long-harbored detestation playing fast at the corners of his words. “I coulda sworn I told you to stay away.”

“Yeah, well, it didn’t really take. Not to mention it’s not very practical. It’s not as if you can tape a line down the middle of the clubhouse or something.”

“You could just not talk to me. Which is what I meant by stay away in the first place. Which you _know_.”

“Whatever.” Zito made a big grin, look how ridiculous this whole mess is, and Mulder’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You wanna give me a ride to my hotel?”

Mulder gave him a look that by all rights should have turned Zito’s hair white. “That’s funny as shit, dude. Really, you’ve come a long way.”

He pulled open the door, clearly intending to leave Zito like that, and Zito tested his side just by reflex, honestly surprised when it gave under his hand. Going with impulse, he jumped inside, his foot smashing a white In-N-Out bag into the corner of the floor.

“Hi,” he said in response to Mulder’s baffled, furious gaze. “Vroom vroom.”

“Get out.”

Zito buckled up, settled right in. This was something, at least, a way to save himself a little time climbing the walls of his hotel room. He wasn’t going to let Mulder get rid of him so easily this time.

Mulder clenched his teeth and started his car, and Zito looked at him with mild suspicion; he’d expected more of a fight than that.

“It’s at like Broadway and 11th,” Zito told him, testing the air.

“Save it for the cabbie. I’m going home.”

Zito nodded, weaving his fingers together around his knee and leaning forward to watch the train pass on elevated tracks, silver-blue worm on a long shallow curve. “That’s okay. I’m adaptable.”

Mulder found an empty stretch of road past the warehouses and abstract factory gridworks, the clogged steam from the sewer grates, and he gunned it, an engine howl and a busted-apart cloud. Zito gave a little inner cheer, his blood kicking up. Speed in any of its definitions, it’d always be his first choice.

“I don’t get you at all,” Mulder said after a long enough time that Zito didn’t think they’d speak again. Zito let out a breath, kept his eyes on the scenery.

“Yeah, I’m a puzzle.”

“Nobody acts like this, you realize? You can’t just, like, _insinuate_ yourself and think you’re eventually gonna catch me off-guard or something.”

Zito laughed. “Dude, you think I need to take this kinda grief just to get laid?”

“Then what the fuck? Seriously.”

“Seriously?” Zito flattened his hand over his heart, took a breath through his teeth, holding Mulder’s wary look. “I’m sick of drinking alone. I get so bored, Mark, you wouldn’t believe.”

Mulder looked surprised at first, filmstrip light rolling over his face and shadowing his slightly open mouth, then swiftly distrustful again. “Any of the guys would have taken you out, it’s your first night. You coulda asked Jason, or Huddy.”

“Yeah?” He felt his stomach tighten. “Real friendly type, is he?”

Confused, Mulder shrugged. “Um, sure. They’re awesome.” He shook his head, mouth thinning again. “Anyway, it’s a pretty bad excuse. I’m not gonna drink with you, either.”

“Didn’t you used to be cool?”

Mulder gave him a twisted little smirk. “Never as cool as you, deuce.”

“Oh, lookit that,” Zito said with a smile, knuckling Mulder’s arm and pushing his luck, just like always. “Sometimes I think you might still like me a little bit.”

But Mulder didn’t, not really, and he closed up after Zito said that, which maybe in some unexplored section of his brain had been the intention. They pushed steadily towards higher ground, Mulder’s cheek hollowed and his hands carved on the wheel, veins standing out. Zito stared out the window, saw the stone and light of the city eaten up as they breached the hills.

Mulder lived in a sprawling one-story house with a wavery alien blue glow over the edge of the fence that evidenced a pool, a smiley face of electrician’s tape fracturing the shine of the bare porchlight. He pulled in behind what looked like an identical version of his car and got out without a word to Zito.

“Hey.” Zito got out, hurried around the car to catch up. “C’mon, man, I go nuts in that hotel room.”

Not turning, Mulder told him, “Not my problem. You can go play with Chavvy if you want.”

“Who the fuck is Chavvy? I want to play with _you_.”

“My roommate,” Mulder said, his voice clipped. “Our third baseman. Your only fucking option.”

Mulder went inside the house, leaving Zito on the porch, unwelcome and wondering why the hell he thought it would be a good idea to follow Mulder home. It just didn’t feel right to spend his first night in the big leagues alone, displaced in a distant town, but that was shaping up to be the case anyway, a debilitating futility to it all.

At a total loss, Zito went inside.

Barely taking the time to introduce Zito to the Latino guy playing videogames on the floor, Mulder vanished down the hall, gone for good with the sound of a door closing, a button lock clicking like an echo just behind.

Zito made the best of it. Chavez, sardonic and good-looking in a shady sort of way, was willing to match him shots and didn’t make too much fun of Zito’s ineptitude at videogames, though Zito saw the half-amazed pity on his face every time Zito let his guy die an unnecessary death. There was bone-jarring music, dark insistent beats, that drilled a headache high behind Zito’s sinuses, his teeth gritted unconsciously until his jaw ached, but he didn’t let on, because it was Chavez’s house and he had nowhere else to go.

*

Zito would never understand exactly how he did it, but somehow he managed to win over Tim Hudson.

Whiplashed, fallen with crazy speed, Zito felt taken over by his ever-lovestruck fourteen year old self, his hands and feet outsized and dangerous once again. He followed Hudson around, held close as if his shadow were a leash, braced for Hudson to call him a pest and shake him off, but days and days passed, and it didn’t happen.

The fourteen year old was in charge of Zito’s actions, his idiotic jokes and shallow anecdotes and high-pitched donkey bray of a laugh, but inside his head Zito was wincing almost all the time, humiliated beyond belief by the recurrence of his most artless year. He could not be handling the situation worse.

Hudson seemed to find him hilarious. Zito couldn’t quite trust that it wasn’t mean-spirited; it wasn’t possible that someone could actually be charmed by Zito in this state.

But they went for barbecue, talking about cop shows and buddy comedies, Hudson humming along to the jukebox. Sawdust on the floor and ceiling fans circling like helicopters, Zito was softly beer-drunk, fighting off a bout of melancholy as he watched Hudson across the table, a paper napkin tucked into his collar and spreading out diamond-shaped on his chest, marked by a three-finger print of barbecue sauce red as war paint.

Nothing ever happened to Zito in a straightforward way, and this was no different. Half the time he was sick with happiness just sitting across the table, sharing a side of cornbread, existing in the same room, and the other half he spent paralyzed and miserable, knowing there was no way Hudson would ever go for someone like him.

But after they paid the tab and moisty-napped their hands clean and popped hard peppermints from the bowl, Hudson said Zito’s name as they were leaving, and when Zito turned around, Hudson tossed a glass of water in his face, the world disintegrating in a single momentary detonation.

Incredibly disoriented, feeling like he’d been attacked by a rogue landfaring wave, trying to taste salt, Zito sputtered and wiped his face with his sleeve, shouting, “What the hell!”

Hudson was laughing hard, arms folded around his stomach, face all screwed up, and he managed, “You had some sauce. On your chin,” hiccupping and hooting and grinning so big, his eyes gleaming.

“Oh well _thanks_ ,” Zito said sarcastically, plucking at the soaked patches on his shirt. Being abruptly wet in public made him feel exposed, see-through.

But then Hudson reached out and pushed the damp weight of Zito’s hair back, just the front part that hung dark in front of his eyes, one moment when Zito’s forehead was clear and cool, before Hudson took his hand away and the hair flickered back into place. Hudson was still grinning, like there’d never been a better joke.

So maybe sometimes Zito wasn’t all that sure how Hudson really felt about him.

Hudson was married, was the first counterargument, and more than that, plainly enamored of pretty much all women everywhere.

It killed Zito because in the clubhouse, on the field, in the dugout, he could generally assure himself of having most of Hudson’s attention, but the second they stepped out among civilians, the second skirts appeared, Hudson was lost to him. They carried on stalling conversations without eye contact, Hudson’s avid gaze scanning and gleeful, and Zito drank too much, listening to his ears ring.

Hudson only ever looked, which was somehow even worse, suggesting that he was probably pretty into his wife. The only solace Zito took most nights was the false impression they made leaving the club, leaving together into all the potential of the next scene.

But they were becoming better friends by the day and that above all other things was the most surprising. Zito had hoped it would fade, their crazy chemistry he swore he could taste in the air, the stutter and grip on his heart, but Hudson never blew him off, always smiled, let Zito draw on his hands and arms, strung him along so nice.

There was no chance for Zito’s good intentions. He was still falling, but not through space anymore, now thickened and slowed, a crushing pressure—it was more like sinking. He was falling down the Marianas Trench.

Hudson drove him home from the bar one night, Zito drunk enough to talk to his hands, press them full across his face and investigate the night-world through his fingers, feeling protected and content and really drunk.

It was late enough that the radio was replaying the day’s game, and Hudson kept saying, “That is _not_ what happened,” and punching the speaker. Zito couldn’t remember anything, he wasn’t even sure if baseball was the right name.

Zito was still living in a hotel, stuck as if in tar, and Hudson idled the car under the overhang, saying goodnight, saying bright and early, kid.

But Zito didn’t get out of the car and didn’t let Hudson leave. He rambled, found one strange tangent and followed it past its natural conclusion, dragged it out as long as he could, then found another. He didn’t want to go inside; this wasn’t where he lived. He didn’t want Hudson to leave.

Hudson played along, yawning and nodding, and Zito was free to stare when Hudson’s eyes were screwed shut, his mouth cracked wide. Zito’s hand moved up and down the glossy-dull strap of his seatbelt unconsciously, a straight diagonal across his chest.

Almost twenty minutes Zito managed to keep him, the car puttering and headlights glowing invisibly under the overhang lights. When Hudson finally extricated himself, Zito stood there waving dumbly at his shrinking taillights, then went upstairs and passed out.

The next morning, suffering an icepick hangover, leaning against the shower wall and letting hot water pound his face, his shut eyes, Zito worked slowly through the night before, fighting whole-body flinches.

He was kind of appalled at himself. Almost twenty minutes they’d sat there gazing blearily at the parking lot, and he hadn’t had the balls to do anything. Why even create the situation if he wasn’t going to exploit it? Why did he let Hudson see him like that?

Whether or not it was a good idea to make a pass at Hudson, Zito figured that it was probably going to happen anyway. One of these nights, the beautiful illusion of the drunk was going to take him over and he wouldn’t believe that anybody had the capacity to turn him down. One of these nights, he wasn’t going to be able to keep his hands off Hudson, thinking heatedly about how his palms might fit into the slanted depressions under Hudson’s hipbones.

It was inevitable. Zito’s lack of a moral code, his evolving alcoholism, his recklessness and inability to turn down a dare, his deeply repressed belief in true love, it was all going to align some night, reach some perfect pitch. At that moment, Zito knew, he’d do something irrevocable, and it wouldn’t feel like a _choice_.

Zito was sure that baseball had something to do with the way he was starting to see everything as predestined. Coming so far so fast had warped his expectations; he kept thinking that he could have anything he wanted now.

*

So Zito bullied Mulder into accepting a five hundred dollar bet over his and Hudson’s comparative drinking abilities, cornering Mulder after he’d gone eight innings and 115 pitches. Mulder was still breathing hard, a rattle in his lungs and an IV needle taped into the back of his hand, an unmarked copper-colored solution that Zito didn’t ask about—they each had their own routines.

It was clear that Mulder had mostly agreed to get Zito out of the goddamn room, getting more agitated because he was powerless, made anemic as the adrenaline leached away and the chemicals set in, but he certainly didn’t think Zito had a shot in hell at downing Tim Hudson.

Neither did Zito, really, he just needed an excuse. Drunk as they both could get, god knew what might happen. Just the possibility was worth half a grand.

He presented the parameters of the contest to Hudson while Hudson was taking his bullpen session the next day, standing on the other pitcher’s mound illustrating with his hands, motor-mouthing. One shot of Jack Daniels every seven minutes, puke-and-rally acceptable, victory upon surrender or debilitation.

He saved the best for last, a suspense-building pause to let Hudson get into his motion before he said happily, “It’s called a Jack-Off.”

Hudson burst out laughing right as he released, and the ball sailed into the seats. Hudson stumbled off the mound, almost lost his balance as he abandoned any pretense of a follow-through. He kept laughing for a minute, and Zito stood with a wide grin on his face, feeling that specific made-him-laugh joy.

Straightening up, catching his breath, Hudson gave Zito a look that tried to be more admonishing than it was, broken by a flashing smile. “There were better moments to tell me that, kid.”

“Seriously,” the bullpen catcher called from the other end. “He could get hurt.”

“I could get hurt,” Hudson echoed reprovingly, but he was still grinning a little bit.

Hudson tucked his glove under his elbow, pulling off his cap and swiping his forearms over his face and hair, something that wrecked Zito even though he saw it ten times a day. Hudson’s hands were held at cocked angles so that they wouldn’t get slick, clean tan arms shining in the aftermath.

Zito sighed, looked at his feet. “What do you think?”

“Well. It’s definitely ambitious of you.”

Quick grin, and Zito shrugged. “I think I got a fighting chance.”

Hudson squinted at him with a neat curl to his mouth, shaking his right hand so fast it blurred into a fan. “I think all this success has gone to your head.”

“Oh, no way. I’m talking rationally, reasonably. First of all, I’m considerably bigger than you. That’s not a dig, just a fact. Second, I grew up in a Navy city, you know. You sneak into a bar at sixteen down there, you better _drink_ or the sailors’ll beat you up and leave you in the police station parking lot. Happened to a buddy of mine. And, what, third? Third, you are a beer-drinker, my friend, do not even try to deny it. You never take shots until after like six beers—I’ve noticed this about you. I’m sure that’s how they roll in the South, I’m just saying, this is a competition for men not frat boys, so I thought actual liquor was probably more appropriate. Coincidentally, actual liquor is something of a hobby of mine, as you might be aware.”

Hudson had returned to his throwing early on, not looking at Zito but wearing a smirk that grew the more Zito talked, and Zito was fascinated by how it was happening in slow-motion, so he kept talking.

Hudson didn’t stop him. Hudson almost never stopped him.

They went to an alien San Leandro bar, somewhere that would be no great loss should they get banned for life. It was also a Raider bar, so they could be assured of going unrecognized.

A shot every seven minutes was an extremely perilous stricture, Zito realized right away. He told Hudson it was because that was the interval after which conversation was supposed to lapse, but Hudson said that conversation never fucking lapsed with Zito around. They discussed extending the time from seven to ten, but somehow the debate itself took almost forty-five minutes, all the while maintaining their original pace. It became a bit of a moot point, after that.

Oh so drunk and for the first time in years it actually surprised Zito, attacking him without warning from behind. The fourteen year old was in charge again, accelerating his reactions and running riot over his long-practiced skill of riding out the rough parts. Zito didn’t know how he’d survived this the first time around, the unforgiving severity of every emotion and his mind flung, tornado-caught.

And Hudson wasn’t helping at _all_ , fever-eyed and increasingly tactile, patter of hard fingers on Zito’s shoulder, scuff through his hair, the twist of his shirtsleeve in Hudson’s fist. Each touch was like a minor hotwire, a jolt he felt everywhere.

Zito kept resetting his stopwatch. It started to feel like New Year’s, constantly counting down, building up to something. Zito got into an end-of-the-world frame of mind, fatalistic and anarchic, darkly certain that he would have already hit bottom if this weren’t hell.

Hudson rapped his knuckles on Zito’s knee, making Zito twitch. “How ya doin’, kid?”

“Still conscious,” Zito said. A fast glance at Hudson caught him pulling an empty shot glass across his mouth, a blurry feral look on his face, and Zito pressed his teeth into his lip, a burnt feeling spreading in his stomach.

“I would say barely. Me myself, I am faring real well.” Hudson smiled beatifically. “I could do this for hours.”

“It’s been hours, I think. I think maybe it’s next year already.”

“Yeah? What’s that, like a wormhole?”

“That’s what it is.” Zito pushed at Hudson’s arm, might as well take it while he could, shook him a bit so that he could keep his hand there, wrapped warm and tight. “This stopwatch controls time.”

Hudson guffawed, losing none of his manic gleam. “Man am I feeling good about my chances here. You oughta go back and never’ve challenged me. Only way you’ll win.”

“You should be more freaked out, I could make it so you were never even born.”

“Aw, you wouldn’t do that.”

Zito paused, the wave sending him reeling all of a sudden, and he let his head drop onto the bar, holding his stomach and waiting for the dizziness to pass. “No,” he mumbled to his knees. “I would probably not do that.”

“It looks kinda like you’re about to forfeit,” Hudson remarked, and Zito wished he would lay his hand on the back of Zito’s neck, smooth over his shoulder blade, something, but no luck.

“Forfeit?” Zito couldn’t remember what the word meant for the longest time, mouthing it to himself and puzzling over its soft sounds, and then it clicked back into place. “Dude, no way.”

He forced himself upright, and thought that if the stopwatch worked, it’d still be no good to him. Time could only move forward, that was one thing of which he was absolutely sure. He could go seven years into the future and see what free agency had in store for him, fifty years and learn if anyone would be with him at the end, but he would never get back to Cape Cod, never again meet that cheerfully dissolute boy he’d been before his mother almost died. .

Hudson multiplied, shuffled and fuzzy at his edges, and Zito thought that he was probably due a few more drunken gropes of his own, and clutched at Hudson’s knee, trying to keep him in a single incarnation. Hudson didn’t acknowledge it, possibly because he’d stopped registering sensation in most of his body, possibly because this was really Zito’s life now. Zito fit his palm to Hudson’s kneecap, laid his fingers down on worn denim, happy for a moment.

The watch went off almost immediately. Jarred, disarmed by the lull in the music, the frantic neon-red bleeps like right before a bomb exploded, Zito pulled back, bashing the stopwatch with his open hand until it was silent, and then snatching at the bar. His face burned, chastened and shot down by the universe itself.

Hudson pushed the next shot towards him with one straight finger like a bridge leading to a mountain, the glass a far-away tower on a gleaming plain, and Zito crossed himself, tossed it back.

He didn’t even recognize the taste anymore, but it had the consistency of gasoline, or maybe that was just his throat at this point. American classic indeed, Zito thought without malice, folding his arms on the bar and resting his chin, warmth spreading down his chest.

“Hey, you see how you’re fallin’ asleep at the bar?” Hudson said, poking at Zito’s arm just a few inches from his face, and Zito had his thought about bridges again. “This indicates to me that you are on the verge of defeat.”

“Nobody’s falling asleep and you can just totally forget about defeat, buddy,” Zito said, and to prove it, he straightened back up, experienced an instance of reeling déjà vu, and stood abruptly to counter it. He swayed, indecisive. “In fact. I have seven minutes, I believe I will take a walk. To. The alley.”

Hudson stood too, sleepy and bruised-looking under his eyes, beard shadow coming in dark, and said, “For some air. I could get in on that.”

Zito nodded, wound his fist in his own shirt as he listened to the kid living inside him crow and cheer. This had to mean something. Zito was half-sure that he’d just made a pass and Hudson had assented.

This could mean _everything_.

He only stumbled once across the bar, something of a victory, but then didn’t account for the high step down out the back door, went tripping and canting sharply forward, all the way to the stone wall. Catching himself on both hands, stopping his forehead bare millimeters from another concussion, Zito paused, let it go, his weight full on the wall for a long moment because just standing was getting tough.

Hudson was wearing actual cowboy boots that he of course pulled off with room to spare, and Zito heard the unique click-tap of his approach, his surveying pace around Zito against the wall.

“You came out here to throw up, didn’t ya kid?”

Zito rolled his forehead, loving the soft feel of a hundred layers of graffiti, but he had to give it up, push himself around and face Hudson.

Really not even _close_ to tolerable, Zito thought with a hard burst of anger, his stomach tightening and hot, never had a fucking prayer.

“I’m miles from that, you really have no idea,” Zito said, took a deep breath. “It’s Mars, Timmy, it’s out tonight, look.”

He pointed straight up, watched Hudson’s eyes obediently rise, the stretch and slope of his throat revealed, the neat curve of his jaw. Hudson said in a whisper, “Where?” and Zito touched his neck, feeling each finger alight individually, four-three-two-one as the last countdown, and then he kissed Hudson on the mouth.

He’d caught him with his lips slightly parted, an indrawn breath, and so there was one moment when Zito could pretend that Hudson was in it, a brush of warmth and wet and the shattering taste of lime.

Just that one, though.

Hudson’s fists locked onto Zito’s chest and shoved him back, crashed him into the wall again with a solid thud. Hudson was laughing, but it wasn’t right, shocked and hysterical, his eyes bigger than Zito had ever seen them.

“Holy _shit_ , Barry,” Hudson said in a broken register, though just hearing his first name was bad enough; Hudson never ever called him that. “What the fuck?”

Zito plastered his hands over his face, pockets of fever in his palms, immolated with humiliation. “Oh god Huddy, don’t hit me.”

“I’m not gonna-” Hudson grabbed Zito’s wrists and dragged his hands down, but he couldn’t make Zito open his eyes. “What the hell was that?”

“Nothing.”

“Bull _shit_.”

“Dude, I swear. I am crazy and drunk as shit and that was just, don’t even concern yourself.”

“Are you fucking _joking_?” Hudson asked as he belied his word a little and punched Zito in the chest, which only hurt because he didn’t see it coming. “Are you honestly thinkin’ that’s gonna suffice?”

“Oh, um.” Zito searched for an escape, desperate. “It was like. I dunno. An experiment.”

“An.” That was as far as Hudson got, stopped so short that Zito had to open his eyes to make sure he was still there, and Hudson was stymied, hopelessly conflicted. His fists were knotted, mouth wrenched and incensed, but his eyebrows were up, pleading.

Zito couldn’t stand to have either of them so exposed, and he compromised, covered up only half his face and kept one eye open. He could pull this off, he was sure of it. He’d been confused once.

“You never think about it?” he said, relieved to hear his voice crack.

Hudson’s eyes managed to get bigger, and he shook his head wordlessly. Zito could not for the life of him interpret the mess of Hudson’s expression, couldn’t fathom where this was going.

“It just happens,” Zito told him in a whisper. “What am I supposed to do about that?”

He dropped his hand for effect, gave Hudson a killer look, all eyes and desolation, not too difficult to muster. Hudson visibly remembered himself, almost like he was recognizing Zito anew, and fit his hand onto Zito’s shoulder.

“It’s not—it’s cool, man, it’s not a bad thing. Just. Not me, okay?” Hudson gave him a little shake, some of his normal color returning, the angle of his glances still incredibly wary. “You’ll figure it out.”

Zito sighed inwardly, realized there was no reason to hide and sighed extravagantly out loud. Hudson patted him on the chest consolingly, and then quickly took his hand away, futilely trying to find his footing. Zito rubbed at the cold spot, openly staring at Hudson nervously pulling his lower lip through his teeth, never having felt less confused in his life.

The night wasn’t bearable after that. Hudson couldn’t even look at him. Separate cabs idled at the curb and Zito said, “I’ll. See you,” and Hudson gave him a stricken look like he hadn’t even considered that they were going to have to see each other again.

Hudson didn’t say anything, which was probably for the best.

Torn the fuck up, eviscerated, Zito pressed his hand to the laminated map of the area screwed to the back of the seat, knowing only that he couldn’t go home like this, wouldn’t survive the night under his own guard.

Mulder’s address floated up from the morass of the drunk, and he gave it to the cabbie in a croak, lay down on the seat with his hands laced over his stomach. He could see the tops of the streetlamps, shaped like brachiosaur necks and zipping past with extended meteor tails. All he could do was concentrate on not getting sick, though it felt inescapable, a necessary end.

Mulder, what was he going to do with Mulder? Zito was drunk and likely Mulder was too and sometimes when they were drunk they fooled around, no matter what Mulder wanted to say. You gotta go to what you know, he thought, and Mulder was fairly benign, declawed because Zito had never been in love with him.

But life being what it was, Mulder wasn’t home, an odd feeling of betrayal when Zito was kneeling on the grass and up for anything, to be denied the one guy in the city who knew him back when.

He was left with Eric fucking Chavez again like a gag prize for failing so miserably all night. Chavez was perhaps understandably pissed-off at being woken up, but Zito wasn’t in any state to deal with it. He kept falling down, kept saying the opposite of what he meant.

The five hundred dollars was his. Hudson would never admit what had actually happened tonight; he’d rather let himself be called lightweight for life. Predictably, it was the slightest and coldest comfort Zito had ever felt.

Chavez brought him inside because it was the quickest and easiest solution, and in the light Zito decided Chavez was better-looking like this, his hair unslicked into tangled curls, his body loose and not all the way alert yet, emotions (irritated and sleepy, fundamentally distracted (perhaps by a robbed dream)) openly displayed. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt with a silkscreen of a metal screw and a baseball—Zito got it after a second and laughed out loud, making Chavez roll his eyes and push Zito onto the couch.

Zito only spent about ten minutes there after Chavez went back to his room, and then slipped down the hall, into Mulder’s silent dust-free room, where the covers were thrown back like an invitation. Zito burrowed in, trying to pick out the various smells, old spice sport and Mulder’s hair stuff, trying to remember if they were the same as when Mulder was nineteen, searching for some kind of continuity.

*

Several days later, Zito realized that Chavez had a crush on Mulder, which was one of the funniest things he’d ever heard in his life.

They were back on the road, or more properly, in the sky, in transit. Watching the brown and blue world recede, the cabin shivering from takeoff, Zito had his regular thought that if he was going to be imprisoned in a tin can that could explode at any moment, he’d really prefer it be a space shuttle, daydreaming of a rise out of this low orbit. Pinpoint-specific feeling of being airsick, his equilibrium slewed. Planes were the ultimate no way out; it made all his symptoms worse.

Ginger ale and oh if only he had a jay right now, but Zito put it out of his mind, got up to pace the length of the cabin, which he did five minutes out of every fifteen. Up and down past his teammates, most of them asleep either with their faces smashed on pillows against the windows or their heads tipped back on the seat, caps pulled over their noses, their slack mouths.

There were only a few guys awake, a cluster of relievers sleepily playing cards in an exit row, a small lit coven in the dark of the cabin, and Chavez and Mulder all the way in the back, six rows past the rest. They were playing chess, Mulder’s plastic travel set with the magnetic pieces that evidently were glow-in-the-dark as well. The lights weren’t on above them; they were weighty shadows same as the other guys, but conscious and rife with destructive potential, more like poltergeists than ghosts.

Zito came back to the tail of the plane again, checked the pale martian-green configuration of pieces on the board and confirmed that he still didn’t know how to play chess. He heard Chavez say:

“I won’t unless you promise not to ditch me.”

Zito went past, into the service area, the vacant green latches on the lavatory doors, and he lingered, stayed in earshot and out of sight.

“Dude, what do you think the point of me going out to clubs is?” Mulder asked. “You think I really like _dancing_?”

Chavez laughed a different laugh than Zito had ever heard from him, lighter in tone and rougher in quality, and Zito could picture him shaking his head, smiling downwards. “I actually woulda guessed the drinking was the allure.”

“Why the hell? I’m drinking right now, that isn’t so special. It’s girls, Eric. Girls are the motivation for everything.”

Zito rolled his eyes, resting his head on the lavatory door, which gave slightly under his back, accordianed in a disorienting way. Mulder had a story and he was sticking to it, but Zito was inclined to believe that karma paid back repressive types by outing them in cripplingly public fashion, and he couldn’t wait to be front row center for this one.

“Girls are also not so special,” Chavez said, his voice almost imperceptibly off-key. “In fact they’re all over the place.”

“Yeah, and I’d like to do something about it.”

Mulder must have made an obscene gesture, a comic’s leer, because Chavez laughed a bit, soft sound of a shove and the quick rattle of the game, the table bumped.

“It’s just always some really noisy club I’ve never been before in some city that I forget the name of after I’m drunk, and I’m _always_ drunk and you come up all, met a girl! see ya! So suddenly I’m responsible for getting myself out of the club and back to the hotel, and, like, two hours later we’re still driving around looking for it ‘cause all I can remember is that it’s kinda tall and has palm trees in front of it.”

Chavez fell abruptly silent, and Zito’s throat caught, replaying that off-key tone, the hooks and hard breaths of his ramble. Too much explanation, too much protest, and Zito pressed his palm to his mouth, smothering silent because he knew the urge to laugh was going to be overwhelming in a second. Half actual amusement and half hysteria, but Zito would take those proportions.

Eric Chavez of all people, jealous over Mark Mulder.

“Anyway, that’s why I wish you wouldn’t,” Chavez concluded eventually, sounding one-dimensional, flat.

There was a pause. “That’s your move?” Mulder asked idly.

“Why? What? What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. Here.”

Another longer pause, Chavez presumably studying the board. “You’re up to something,” Chavez said after a minute.

“Oh, we’re gonna talk about secret agendas now?” Mulder shot back. “Check.”

It ran like a tape loop in Zito’s mind immediately, _secret agendas_ , the quick shorthand rush of it, like Mulder just wanted to remind Chavez of something, just scare him back. Mulder _knew_ , Zito realized suddenly. Chavez had a crush on him and Mulder knew it.

“I just don’t know Kansas City very well,” Chavez said quietly after a minute, deeply subdued now. “And yeah, I know-”

“-checkmate,” they said as one, and then Mulder said again, “Checkmate. You gotta let me say it, man.”

Zito listened to Chavez sigh, warped by the engine noise into a moan, the sound of a bruise. Surprisingly affected, Zito rubbed at his chest, waited a few minutes before faking leaving the bathroom and heading back down the aisle, fighting his own demons.

He chanced a look back before he sat down, saw Mulder trying to sleep against the window now, and Chavez was staring, impossible to tell from that angle whether his focus was Mulder’s smooth profile or the glittering crescent of night sky that existed beyond it.

*

Once Zito started looking for it, the evidence leapt at him from all directions.

So subtly solicitous, Chavez tagged after Mulder, followed his cues so automatically that it might have been unconscious. He never got a coke for himself without getting two, a powerbar ever in his back pocket even though Chavez was allergic to something in them. When Chavez got drunk, Mulder’s name was every third word out of his mouth.

Zito was actually starting to feel pretty dumb for not having put it together sooner.

It was an immensely entertaining underground soap opera for the first couple of days, Zito tracking the flex and shifts of their interactions from across the room, across the grass. He was the only one paying attention and it was easy to pretend that it was being staged just for him, encoded and personalized.

He spent a lot of time wondering if Chavez had ever tried anything. Hours of dead time every day, and Zito found himself staring out bus windows and over plane wings, weaving intricate scenarios that took place within the gray carpets and white walls of the house they shared.

Mulder would be drunk; Chavez must be smart enough to realize that Mulder would _have_ to be drunk for him even to have a shot. When Mulder was drunk he got obtusely insecure and clumsy, pliant in a way that always demolished Zito’s better intentions.

So Mulder would be drunk and Chavez too, for courage he would have matched Mulder all night, dousing the crazy pound of his heart, because Chavez would have decided, resolved himself: _tonight_.

In the kitchen, Zito thought, curling in on himself slightly. The blue and white tile of the counters gleaming, really really late at night, home from the bar and they would keep the lights off, feeling secretive and sly. Clear cold glasses of water and Chavez would watch Mulder drinking, thin-eyed cataloging the roll of his throat, stray paths of water drops down his forearm. Mulder would look perfect in that moment, in that way he sometimes did.

Chavez would tell some meandering story to distract Mulder, inch closer on a poor excuse, and he’d wait until Mulder was laughing, or yawning, unprotected and off his guard, and then Chavez would take his chance. Hands on Mulder’s hips, maybe, hard because Mulder would jerk instinctively, try to pull away. Chavez would have to lock Mulder in place. Hold him down.

And Mulder, poor Mulder would be terrified, overcome by that lightning arousal that had taken his legs out from under him in an equipment shed long ago. His body wanting one thing and his mind another, nothing looked better on the man than confusion, gaped mouth and blown-up eyes, all his dark potential come clear.

Mulder would try to stop Chavez but what could he say, what could he do? Chavez was already on his knees, his fists on Mulder’s belt, knuckles hard as brass in the cup of Mulder’s hip. Mulder would scramble at Chavez’s shoulders and he’d try to say something that could be easily misconstrued ( _dude, dude, fuck, please_ ), and somehow his long hands would slide instead into Chavez’s black hair.

It’d all be downhill from there.

Zito couldn’t decide if Chavez would be untested. He found it equally plausible that Chavez was as successfully queer as he himself, and that Chavez had never made it with another guy in his life. He could see how Mulder could take a man by surprise.

He switched back and forth while narrating it to himself. Sometimes it was brutally short and Chavez knew exactly what he was doing, going ruthless and deep until Mulder was shouting, wrenching jaggedly back and forth. That was for first thing in the morning on getaway day, after waking up that perpetual ten minutes before his alarm, when Zito’s mind was a backdrop of heat and fog and all he knew outside the fantasy was that he had to hurry.

Red-eye cross-country flights, feigning sleep in the near-complete dark, Zito had more time and the idea of Chavez as a novice appealed to him more. Chavez would start slow, achingly hesitant, but then his innate competitiveness would kick in over the fear and he’d go too fast, too hard, pull back, start again. Using his hands, everything he could think of, rationalizing now: he was over the line, already doing it, no reason to hold back anymore.

He’d only be listening for one thing, his eyes open (maybe), stealing glances up at Mulder and praying to hear it. Chavez wouldn’t even have a clear idea of what it was, wouldn’t know the mad stuff Mulder said right before, that best last moment, but he’d have a sense. Somewhere up ahead, he’d know that much.

Zito always cut it off at the high point (usually his too), a sudden fade to white that might last thirty seconds. He didn’t want to think about what would happen the next day, unable to figure out the next day in his own life.

All his possible storylines ended badly, which was maybe just his state of mind, but anyway, Zito could admit that he was at least somewhat conflicted about Mark Mulder. The whole thing was most reminiscent of the several weeks’ interval in Cape Cod between the equipment shed and hooking up with Mulder again, when he’d kept the memory as a lit match, a neat grown-up collision that had left a place behind as warm as shoes by a radiator.

But this thing, this Mulder and Chavez thing, Zito went through improbable little daydream fads like every other normal person on the planet, and this wouldn’t last any more than his two-week nocturnal obsession with Billy Beane had. He was taking advantage of the distraction, though, knowing that when it faded he’d be back to being totally unmanned by Tim Hudson.

Zito could watch Chavez watching Mulder for hours. There was something about the banked hunger in his expression, the faint stricken angle of his mouth, coal-black eyes designed to remain unread. It shouldn’t have been comforting to Zito but for some perverse reason it was—Chavez looked like someone he loved was dying, like he was watching it happen.

It was surely the same look Zito wore around Hudson, and Zito thought sometimes about how much he and Chavez had in common.

*

Hudson had avoided Zito in the days immediately following his disastrous first attempt, throwing Zito into a despondency that only chemicals could counter, but by the road trip they were talking again, if never for very long. It was clear that Hudson didn’t trust him, which might have hurt Zito’s feelings if he weren’t still committed to sleeping with Hudson before one of them got traded.

But they were talking and that was a start; every debauched night in Zito’s life had begun with talking.

The other universal ingredient was alcohol, so Zito told Jason Giambi it was the hundred year anniversary of the Athletics of Oakland, Kansas City, and Philadelphia, and the party at the hotel was already an hour underway before someone who knew better spoke up. It was the sentiment that counted, everybody generally agreed, and they pressed on.

His plan progressing apace, Zito concentrated on getting lit, palling around with Eric Byrnes, who was engrossed in some kind of feud against half the team. There was a lot of subtext and understated power plays; Zito couldn’t really follow it all, but he had a feeling Byrnes was the villain of this piece, and Zito had always had a soft spot for bad guys.

He kept his own designs unobtrusive, untraceable, starting a rumor early in the night that in Hudson’s room there were titty magazines, and not just any either, but _Dutch_ , special ordered, filthiest stuff you ever saw. Zito scattered each bit to different guys, the ones who would do the most damage with it and who were coincidentally the least likely to put together Zito’s part in it.

By one in the morning, despite Hudson’s increasingly vocal claims that y’all are fucking _nuts_ , his arms and legs were pinned down and he was relieved of his keycard. They staged a raid, search and secure, and Zito checked giddily under the pillows, then started walloping people. Predictably, they descended swiftly into chaos.

At the worst of it, Giambi bellowing and four guys jumping on the bed, Zito ducked into the bathroom, hiding in the shower and counting down from ten over and over again until finally Hudson hollered at the top of his lungs, “Fucking shut the fuck up hotel security is outside and we’re getting fucking kicked out!”

It did a good job of cutting the noise level, though it wasn’t strictly true. Nobody was getting kicked out of the hotel—everybody was getting kicked out of everybody else’s room.

Zito listened to the shuffle and fractured protests of the exodus, chewing his thumbnail and trying to decide if this was the dumbest idea he’d ever had, trying to remember if he’d been drunk or tweaked when he thought of it. He’d wanted to get Hudson alone, he knew that, but if he’d ever had a secondary objective, it was at the moment lost to him.

Hudson shouted, “Good night!” loud enough that it echoed in the bathroom, bounded around Zito’s mind. It was followed abruptly by Hudson slamming the door and then possibly kicking something.

Zito took a deep breath, counted to two hundred to give Hudson a chance to calm down a bit. It felt like a half-hour, forcing his mind to stay on the numbers, just that and none of the clamor of second guesses, the building fear. He was already _here_. He wasn’t backing out now.

Stepping out of the shower, silent to the bathroom door, Zito peeked out and saw Hudson resignedly shoving the bed back into place against the wall, rehooking the sheet around a mattress corner. He looked tired and aggrieved, but certainly not unapproachable.

Zito came out of the bathroom, stood for a minute waiting to be noticed before getting fidgety and saying in a quiet voice, “Hello.”

The quiet didn’t help, and Hudson physically jumped, yelping. Zito almost laughed; the only other person he’d startled as badly as that was Mulder. A smear of curses sprang from Hudson as he glared furiously at Zito, his hand plastered over his heart.

It was a terrible start, and Zito despaired. His only hope had been nothing going wrong and maybe God intervening towards the end, and already, five seconds into it, he’d fucked it up.

He held his hands out to show that he posed no threat at all. “I’m sorry man, that was unexpected. Impolite.”

“Where the fuck were you?” Hudson asked, deep lines etched on his forehead.

Zito pointed back to the bathroom. “I didn’t want to get thrown out, so I hid.”

“That was a lie. Scare tactic. You can go back to your room now.”

“Yeah. Well.” Zito dropped his eyes, fighting a green-like rush, adrenaline run wild and he had to stay in control. “I also feel like things are weird.”

Hudson shot him an inscrutable look, a blur on his features like heat shimmer. “I hadn’t noticed,” he replied.

“Dude, c’mon.”

“What?” Hudson said sharply. “What’d you expect?”

“Clearly not _this_ ,” Zito said, flapping his hand between them. “Clearly I wasn’t trying to wreck everything. Can I get the benefit of the doubt on that at least?”

“No, not really,” Hudson said back, his eyes flashing now and his heart in it again. “’Cause you think it’s about the gay thing, but it’s not—you could be a girl and it’d be the same. I shot you down, you made a big play and all, it ended badly. That’s pretty much beyond debate, right? _So_ -” and he reached out to poke Zito’s chest, giving him a catch-up-shortbus look, “We’re not hanging out so much right now because it’s fucking awkward, all right? And embarrassing, but that’s mostly just you. I was doin’ you a favor, giving you time to get your shit together or whatever.”

Hudson sighed, rubbing the back of his head. His expression was mixed up between irritation and discomfort, the ambiguous traces of affection that even all this drama couldn’t cure.

“And then you do something like this and it only gets weirder,” he continued, sounding deeply tired. “You’re really really bad at this stuff, I think I should tell you.”

Zito sank onto the bed, seeing his dismal hope of success in a moment of clarity. He tilted his face up, attempting a smile. “Not usually.”

“I hope you’re not usually hitting on your teammates, ‘specially not the married ones.”

“Oh, well.” Feeling his face heat, Zito kept his eyes trained on his hands, wishing for the uneven veil of the drunk to return. “At the moment there’s just you.”

Warped little laugh, and Hudson saying caustically, “Lucky me.”

“You are, you know,” Zito said quickly, a spur of activity under his skin and he latched onto it, seeing where the limits were. “Maybe you think I do this all the time but I don’t, I wouldn’t. You gotta understand, Tim, sometimes, sometimes I like you more than baseball.”

“Jesus, kid,” and Hudson was at the end of his rope, getting loud and swiping his hand, making Zito flinch backwards. “What are you _doing_? Quit making it worse!”

“I’m not, I’m trying to explain,” Zito protested, his own voice rising because it was getting good now. “You never let me explain anything.”

“There’s no point, you’re not gonna convince me in a million years, I swear to you. You’re only gonna make it weird for the rest of fuckin’ time, so _please_.”

“You don’t know,” Zito said desperately, getting to his feet as a reckless last-chance feeling dove in his stomach, somehow surprised to be reminded how much bigger he was than Hudson. “You got this idea in your head but it’s not like you think, man.”

Hudson looked at him with his eyes bugged, pure disbelief and overwhelming irritation that was sliding into anger more by the second. “I don’t think about it because I have no. Fucking. Interest.”

“Because you don’t what it’s like!”

“Because I don’t care! And because I’m married, I’ve always been married.”

Zito shook his head and felt like his brain rattled loose a bit; it was the only thing that could explain what he said next in a panicked rush, “That’s what I mean, you never had a chance. There’s stuff I can do that she never even thought of-”

Hudson cut him off by punching him in the face. In retrospect, Zito probably had it coming.

He fell back against the bed, clutching at his eye though it didn’t hurt yet, just a numb heaviness, a thick block in his throat. His sneaker heels caught and slid on the carpet and he lost his balance, fell onto the floor. Pain exploded suddenly in his head, and with it a stammering horror at how poorly he was doing right now.

“Aw, fuck,” Zito heard Hudson say as if from two rooms away. “Are you okay? You fuckin’ moron, lemme see.”

Hudson’s hands alit on Zito’s face, fluttering uncertainly at his temples, and the slight sensation tore through Zito, a ghost of everything he wanted. He ripped his head to the side, ducking away and stumbling to his feet. He kept his hand covering as much of his face as he could get away with, his heart not breaking so much as being wrung out, bled dry.

“I’m sorry,” he said, folding at how miserable he sounded to his own ears. “I’m okay, I’m just, it’s fine.”

The door, the door, and Zito was almost sure he was heading in the right direction, blind from trying not to bust out weeping until he made the hallway. Hudson took Zito’s shoulder from behind, saying, “hey,” with as much annoyance as concern, and Zito pulled away, scrabbling at the door.

“Just let me go, will you?” he said in a blur, feeling like the numbness had spread to his mouth. “It didn’t hurt. I’m sorry I said that. Please let me go.”

He let his head rest on the door, holding his breath as if it were glue for the rest of him, and Hudson said with his voice cracked and helpless, “You’re killing me, kid, c’mon.”

Zito couldn’t hear that from him, and he wrenched open the door too hard, clocked himself on the forehead and stunned a burst of stars across his vision. He was going to cry, any second now, and he couldn’t stand it, hated this moment like nothing that had ever happened to him.

“You told me,” Zito said quick, roughened and slurred, almost a drawl. “You’re not like that so I’ll just get the fuck out of here, okay, fine, _fine_.”

He couldn’t see, he could hardly breathe, and he tripped over something, the doorstep or the carpet, the invisible tripwires of his enemies sending him pinwheeling into the hall. The door clapped shut before he hit the carpet hands first, scoring the first layer of skin off his palms.

Zito lay there for a second, reeling and exhausted and hoping dimly, at a lower level of consciousness, that Hudson would come out after him, make sure he was okay. The interval passed, though, and Zito sat up slowly, curling around his folded knees. He thought he might be in shock.

There was more than one thing wrong with him, but this predilection for ballplayers was going to be his ruin. They were all straight or in denial and Zito just didn’t have the energy to fight the tide anymore. He wasn’t falling anymore, pretty sure that this was what the sudden stop felt like.

Someone kicked his foot, startling him terribly, and he jerked his head up, the beige and pale blue hallway blurred and disjointed, an ominous dark shape looming over him. He blinked fast and the lines and colors solidified, revealing Eric Chavez in boxers and a T-shirt, a bent sad little smirk on his face.

Tired beyond words, Zito said without thinking, “I can’t believe this keeps happening to me,” and watched in wonder as Chavez’s smirk split into a grin, an offered hand.

On his feet, his head spinning from blood rush and the possible concussion, another flood of abject humiliation crashed over him as it became evident that Chavez understood exactly what had just happened to Zito. He couldn’t help it, couldn’t pull away from Chavez’s hot grip around his wrist. Leading him down the hall, Chavez looked bizarrely gleeful, scaring Zito and confusing him severely.

He knew he shouldn’t let anybody see him like this, but surely Chavez had seen him worse. Zito felt like he’d been sick for months, too weak to stand on his own, and maybe Chavez was necessary right now.

Chavez pushed Zito into his room, sat him down on the bed and disappeared back into the hallway, leaving Zito to finger the rising bruise around his eye, trying not to think about anything. Chavez returned with a full bucket tucked in his arm, twisted up an ice-pack and stood right in front of Zito, carefully laid it down on his eye, cradling the back of Zito’s head in his other hand.

“He hit you kinda hard, huh?” Chavez said in a soft voice, meeting Zito’s blank staring eye.

Zito swallowed, his throat pinched from having his head back, and he exhaled slow and rough, nodding slightly and thinking, yes, that was it. He’d been hit so hard.

Chavez tipped his head, his expression getting soft and obscure. His hand pushed deeper into Zito’s hair and Zito could feel his fingers pattering faintly in the dent at the base of his skull, wondering which of the two of them was shaking.

“I deserved it,” Zito said, his voice unrecognizably hoarse. Chavez nodded.

“Of course you did.”

“I’ve been having some trouble recently.”

“Yeah, rookie, I know.”

Zito waited for Chavez to add something else, some small barb, but he stayed quiet, holding the ice-pack in place, idly tracing his thumb up and down the line of Zito’s nose. It was a good thing to focus on, something grounding and repetitive, as stabilizing in its way as Chavez’s other hand on the back of Zito’s head, which was currently serving as the foundation of the world. Chavez looked different tonight than he usually did, or maybe it was just the angle.

“I’m just trying to get along, you know,” Zito said, but halfway through he decided it was an impossibly weak thing to say, and he trailed off, whispering by the end of it. He trained his cycloptic gaze over Chavez’s shoulder, searching for the intersection of three walls.

“Sure,” Chavez said, sounding distracted and coarse. “It happens.”

Zito’s eyebrows ticked up, one mostly thwarted by the weight of the ice-pack, thinking of how Chavez looked at Mulder, wondering how much of this Chavez had already lived.

“So,” Zito said as Chavez lifted the ice-pack away, glossed his fingertips over Zito’s shiner. “What do you do when it happens?”

Chavez smiled briefly at him, his eyes half-shut, a crazy kind of dark. “Improvise, man,” he told Zito, and Zito leaned up as Chavez leaned down, meeting hard in the middle with a click of teeth, the pressure of Chavez’s fingers high on Zito’s cheek increasing, taffy-slow pain coloring the kiss.

And okay, Zito thought, opening his mouth and grabbing Chavez’s hips, pulling him down. Okay, okay, so this is how it’ll be.

*

It was a whole new world order, that first week sleeping with someone when Zito could hear the clicks and whirrs as his perspective shifted, his chemical reactions recalibrated. Chavez had come out of the clear blue sky, or maybe he hadn’t (Zito was also rethinking everything that had led up to this, as you do), but at any rate Zito had done no preparation. He was moving on his instincts, piecing it together.

Chavez was an undercover sort, hiding in plain sight and casting Zito flicker-dark glances across the clubhouse, playing this intricate game the scope of which Zito had only a vague impression. Zito would follow his signals all day, until he found himself pinned up against another hotel room door, realizing that he’d been perfectly played, walked right into it.

He usually didn’t mind. Chavez was uncanny; he knew the basics but it’d clearly been years and years since he’d had practical experience, and with all his concentration on improving, that first week was a streaking upward curve, exponentially better every time he got Zito alone.

Living in a series of hotel rooms was affecting Zito’s perception of time in a bad way, an interchangeable inoffensive background like stock sets in old TV sitcoms, and he lost track of where they were, what skyline or time zone, what year it was, purely tetherless as extended travel and surrealistic sexual encounters will make a person.

Surreal wasn’t the right word; it only felt that way because it was Chavez, like Zito had slipped into some neighboring dimension and back in his own reality he was actually being fucked by Hudson like he was supposed to be. Zito figured that eventually he’d get over that, or, more likely, this thing with Chavez would run its course inside a month and Zito would move on to his next mistake.

Right now, though, he’d take what he could get and that was crystal-clear.

Twenty minutes before their wake-up call, Chavez came to Zito’s room and herded him into the bathroom, leaning in the doorway while Zito brushed his teeth, still mostly asleep and certain that this was a dream. He was pretty sure he’d grown out of being ordered to brush his teeth.

But when he was done, Chavez said, “All right, good,” and hopped up on the counter, curling his hands on Zito’s shoulders and drawing him in. White glare off the tile and mirrors bled through Zito’s eyelids, feeling slowed and secondhand drunk, hoping mutedly that kissing Chavez was always going to fuck with the pace of things.

“See,” Chavez said when he pulled away short of breath, flushed and anxious. “We gotta do this now, we’re gonna.”

He hooked his legs around Zito’s waist and Zito groaned, pressing his face into Chavez’s neck and leaning full on him, feeling the give and fit, the scrape of Chavez’s chin on his forehead. So slow, drugged and heated, endless even though the outside world was fifteen minutes from reclaiming them, and Zito ran his hands under Chavez’s shirt, slick up his back.

“Yeah, man, like that,” Chavez said, his hands at work between them as his voice shook. “’Cause we got dinner and the club tonight, remember? Ah. You don’t remember.”

Chavez got his sweats and Zito’s boxers pushed out of the way and took them in hand, both of them crying out in key, and Zito bit Chavez’s shoulder, felt him jerk and shudder and did it again. Same reaction except worse, and Chavez gripped Zito’s hair in his free hand and pulled his head back, Chavez’s eyes flashing and his mouth red.

“Trying to do you a favor,” he said roughly, and Zito wasn’t listening, hadn’t been, moving in rhythm and blinded by arousal, unstuck in time at last. “You wanna get off today, huh? Yeah, man?”

“Oh god, shut up,” Zito said. He kissed Chavez’s jaw, licked at his mouth until Chavez kissed him back, messy distracted kiss with both of them half-panting, foreheads dug together. “Shut up, please, please.”

Chavez laughed against Zito’s cheek, his legs trembling against Zito’s sides. “I will if you keep saying please.”

It was no trouble at all, soon enough the only word Zito could say.

None of it was any trouble at all, and that’s what got Zito in the end. They’d both been shredded, broken in complementary ways, and they didn’t require anything of each other beyond the sex. It was restful, undemanding. Zito didn’t particularly care about Chavez, comfortable that the sentiment was shared.

Chavez slept over at Zito’s place in San Francisco a lot, which maybe had something to do with postcoital lethargy and maybe something to do with Mulder. He was noticeably different when he was physically in Zito’s bed, looser and easier, a native grace like fieldwork but unrushed, sleepier. It was like a free zone, the one place Chavez was able truly to relax, and so Zito didn’t ask any questions. He just bought a red toothbrush to share the cup with his blue one. He bought white sheets, thinking of Chavez’s black hair.

*

The season picked up speed, the multicolored panes of the world beginning to clip past.

Zito woke up in September to find that he was smackdab in the middle of a pennant race, the tight eye of the storm where only for a moment he got a sense of the big picture, the amorphous green dream of October briefly crystallized. He tried to explain the feeling to Chavez, but Chavez wouldn’t talk about it. None of Zito’s teammates would talk about it, actually, which made him think he should probably keep his mouth shut.

So he oriented himself around the smallest things, fixed to his routine. Pitching occupied his thoughts constantly, every lineup in the league, every stitch on the ball, every violation of physics that he could imagine, and Chavez said that Zito conducted mound conferences in his sleep.

Winning the division was the first thing, and when it happened there was joy on a whole other scale, capering across the field and ricocheting off his teammates. Zito bear-hugged Mulder in the fray, lifting him off his feet, and it was a credit to the moment that Mulder only laughed and shook free, put Zito in a headlock and razzed his head, knocking his cap off to be trampled with the rest.

They tumbled down into the plastic-wrapped clubhouse, where every man got a bottle of champagne and a cheap white celebratory T-shirt, a stiff black cap with the tag still on. Music began to pound before the first cork was popped, the first triumphant spray unleashed.

Zito, being a rookie, was summarily soaked within the first five minutes. Eyes burning, ears ringing, shoulders walloped and bruised, he couldn’t remember feeling better than this, searching the blurry crowd for someone, not really sure who until he saw Hudson wringing out his shirt, shouting gleefully with Ramon Hernandez.

Nothing could go wrong in that moment, so Zito fought his way through the guys and latched onto Hudson, grinning madly.

“Dude!” he yelled, and Hudson hollered it back. “This is the coolest thing ever!”

Hudson nodded, happy as anything and gleaming with it. “Definitely, so fuckin’ cool.”

“The ESPN guy’s drunker’n hell, did you see?” Zito pointed him out, his other hand hovering over Hudson’s back. “So he’ll probably get all our names wrong or something.”

“Don’t say shit like that,” Hudson said. “This is perfect, everything about it’s gonna be perfect.”

A drop of champagne marked the center of Hudson’s forehead, slid straight down his nose to a ski-jump end. He had a bigger smile on his face than Zito had ever seen—it was making him kinda dizzy.

“You’re right,” he said, and couldn’t help it, hugged Hudson around the shoulders. “It’s gonna be great.”

Hudson’s shirt was damp and Zito was trying not to pay too much attention to his compact chest and arms, trying not to notice how Hudson tensed under his arm. They’d only just approached unstrained relations recently, rebuilding after the summer’s Cold War. Zito shouldn’t push it, but it was perfect, everything was going to be perfect.

“Kid,” Hudson said, and tugged on Zito’s shoulder, got him to bend down for Hudson to say in his ear, “You seem better now.”

Zito pulled away, blinking and knuckling champagne out of his eye. A blush heated his face, but hopefully that could be explained by the win. “Maybe a little,” he said, a knotted feeling in his stomach like when he was lying, but he really didn’t think this was one of those times.

Hudson smiled at him, and the drag on Zito’s heart at the sight of it was more nostalgic than the fresh wound it’d been in the mid-summer. He clapped his hand on the side of Zito’s neck and gave him a little shake.

“I’m feelin’ real good about this whole thing,” Hudson told him, and Zito nodded, closing his eyes to concentrate on the scuffed warmth of Hudson’s hand and the eleven games they had left to win.

Later, Zito was giving a nonsensical and disjointed interview to one of the radio stations, laid bare for the millions of people living under the airwaves. It was not smart, as Zito was blitzed and prone to single sentences that ran on for minutes at a time. Probably seeing the expression on the interviewer’s face from across the room, Chavez materialized at Zito’s elbow and gave everyone an engaging smile.

“I’m gonna need to interrupt and take you away from people with microphones now,” Chavez said like he’d been planning it, hooking an arm around Zito’s neck and snickering at the look of undiluted relief that crossed the interviewer’s face.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Zito remarked without judgment, just the facts.

Chavez snorted. “I think the listening audience would disagree.”

“Hey. I give a fine interview, those microphone motherfuckers love me. I’ve heard you, one day at a time and that bullshit. Puts me to sleep.”

They left the mayhem and commotion of the celebration, through swinging doors and short stone hallways where only the thudding hint of the bass line could be heard, and Zito heard himself talking too loudly, couldn’t quite make himself stop. Chavez’s arm was around his waist, hand wedged onto Zito’s hip under his belt, and Zito never wanted to walk drunk again without this kind of support.

“Being charming to reporters is not in my contract,” Chavez said.

“Some of us don’t have to try.” Zito tripped on the unmarked floor, half-intentionally to feel Chavez catching his fall, rebalancing him without breaking stride. “Where are you taking me?”

“Someplace where we can celebrate properly.”

“Oh. Well, excellent.”

A sideways white glint of Chavez’s teeth in the dim light, something to chase in the night. He led Zito to an unlit windowless office, a chairless desk under a patina of dust, a calendar from two years ago the only decoration.

“Nobody’s gonna come down?” Zito asked mostly out of habit, preoccupied pushing his hands under Chavez’s cool damp T-shirt, his slippery jersey.

Chavez shivered, rattling his body under Zito’s hands, and shook his head. “Nothing like an open bar to clear the rest of the building.”

“That’s really smart, Chavvy,” Zito said, dropping to his knees as he shoved Chavez’s shirts up, licking the diffuse golden taste off his stomach. Chavez took Zito’s head in his hands, leaning back against the desk.

“Ah, look at you,” Chavez breathed out, his eyes huge and blacked-out, all pupil staring down at Zito. “This is so good, man.”

Zito nodded, forehead sleeking on Chavez’s stomach, an undertone of grass amid the tastes of sweat and champagne, everything about it unhinging Zito a little more. The small groaning sounds Chavez made, the hard rub of his palms on Zito’s head, reddened impressions on unmarked skin when Zito worked his shorts down, he could go on for days.

The force and urgency never seemed to wane, and Zito thought he might like this way best of all, quick and dirty in a dark side office while all their friends were looking the other way, his mind ringing from fifty thousand voices raised on high, panting writhing boy offered up to him without restriction, and right at this moment Zito wouldn’t change a thing.

*

After they lost the fifth game of the division series, the latest team in an endless list to be bowed and beaten by the Yankees, Zito went on something of a bender.

It was like falling out of the sky or running into a wall, vaudeville-hooked around the neck and slung backwards. They’d come into the playoffs convinced in their blood that they would go all the way, they wouldn’t stand for anything else. All around them they’d found signs that they were meant to be, all the pieces snicking into place.

Zito thought it was probably worse for him than the others, too, because he’d come so far so fast, blessed left arm and his family still intact. He couldn’t figure out what crime he’d committed to make his luck change so dramatically, and it was starting to feel like his life up till now had been prelude, the set-up for this fall.

So he crawled into a bottle for a couple of days, hating the frayed denouement of the season, packing up their lockers and holding a final few subdued and dejected team meetings. Nobody noticed his slur or muffled hamfisted movements because most of the others were in the same way.

He wasn’t blacked out, more like grayed out, a murky shadow over everything so that his memories were unreliable. All he wanted was to get clear of Oakland, dying for the deep blue ocean four hundred miles south.

The night before he left, he went to two or three clubs on three or four little green pills, the last of those that he’d pocketed when he left the ballpark for the last time. He was beyond help by one in the morning, beyond reach and crashing hard, drinking as fast as he could to cushion the blow.

He kept as his constant Chavez’s address, running in his head and written in blue ink on the back of his hand. It stilled his nausea, the whirl of the room, better than a stationary point, the familiar one-two-three of the numbers, the pretty Spanish street name. He was mumbling it to himself by the time he left the club, only raising his voice when he fell into a cab.

Chavez let him in without even a sideways glance at the hour or Zito’s condition, and Zito loved that about him. He was past drunk and into a whole other dimension, erratic and speed-burnt at the edges.

Chavez was wearing sweats from high school and a shirt from middle school, worn thin as silk, and Zito couldn’t keep his hands off him, couldn’t get close enough even though he knew he was too fucked up to follow through. They fell on top of the wrung sheets and Zito curled up around him as Chavez huffed and wriggled like it was some great inconvenience. He settled after a moment with Zito’s head on his chest, his arm a long line of heat on Zito’s back.

Zito located Chavez’s heartbeat and made that his new constant.

Some amount of time passed. At rest at last, Zito felt the petty strains of the day and the raucous mix of contraband in his veins begin to melt out of him, leaving bare the dwarfing bone-deep exhaustion that had defined him ever since the fifth game. He’d hoped to drink his way unconscious before having to face it again, but here he was.

Chavez’s hand moved from Zito’s back to his hip, half under his shirt, smooth and unthinking. Zito felt the upward press of his inhale before he spoke.

“My dad thinks it’d be easier on me if I came home.”

Zito glanced up at him, found Chavez studying the ceiling. “Change of scenery,” he said, his tongue feeling thick. “Bad memories around here.”

“Not all,” Chavez replied. “It was good up until a week ago.”

“But what a week.”

Chavez’s chest jumped as he laughed shortly, joyless, and Zito lost track of his heartbeat. “Worst of my life to date.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Zito said without thinking about it, concentrating on Chavez’s heart.

“Oh really? You lost the World Series before we met, huh?”

“What?” Zito looked up quickly, feeling trapped suddenly. His stomach turned, his mind sickly alive with four months he’d lived that were worse than this. He couldn’t tell Chavez that now, with both of them already so pressed by sorrow. “Um, no.”

“So?” Chavez’s hand traveled on an effortless path up Zito’s side, fingers tripping on ribs under his shirt, and Zito shook faintly, bowing his head on Chavez’s chest.

“Nothing. Just talking shit,” Zito said, faltering only a little. It could pass for general misery. “I’m pretty tired.”

“You’re,” Chavez started to say, and then stopped. The deliberate glide of his hand stopped too, and Zito felt the loss of it keenly, scared as if it were Chavez’s heart that had gone quiet.

“What?” he said in a whisper, curving his fingers around Chavez’s hip and wishing without much hope that there was something Chavez could say that would make this worthwhile.

Chavez didn’t answer for a long time, and Zito gave up on him, caught in an undertow that dragged him down and down. He was half-asleep when the world jolted beneath his cheek, and Chavez’s rough voice echoed like the narration of a dream, saying:

“You’re the only person I wanted to see tonight.”

*

Zito lived in a bad part of Hollywood that off-season, superstitious and not wanting to jinx anything by acting as rich as he was. Trash-can fires on the sidewalks guided him home at night, floating disks of flaming red in the darkness. Every brick in the building had at least one chip in it, the stairs soft old wood under bald carpets.

He liked it because he could afford better, still convinced that he felt more comfortable in fleabit minor hotels and greasy spoons. The money was best left mostly ignored, because someday he’d probably need it.

This winter was worse than the year before, not a positive trend, but Zito figured it was just another difference between the farm and the Show, the way everything was jacked up in intensity, the highs higher and the lows low enough to decimate.

Living alone, set up for it, he was haunted by the fifth game of the playoffs like the scariest movie he’d ever seen, which had kept the lights on all night for a whole spring when he was nine years old. There was nobody around in the mornings, nobody late at night, and Zito was left on his own for weeks at a time, anonymous and hooded on the streets, talking to himself while making dinner. It wasn’t very pleasant, he found. He didn’t seem to be the man he’d hoped for at all.

Then Chavez came by at three in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving, a little while after Zito had gotten home from drinking with his sisters for hours after the family meal. Zito wasn’t expecting him, had only spoken to him in the abstract since the end of the season. Chavez had left two messages, a couple weeks ago.

Zito had passed out hard, stuffed and hammered and dizzy from laughing and singing—it’d been a good night. He didn’t know how long Chavez had been leaning on the door buzzer before it finally penetrated the black-velvet dream. When he got out of his bed, his body didn’t work like he wanted it to, or maybe it was his head, he couldn’t tell.

But then he found Chavez at the other end of the intercom, materialized down in the street and asking to come up. Zito never would have guessed, stunned and slowed because he was half-asleep and really drunk still. It was a dream, it had to be. Chavez didn’t know where he lived down here, or maybe he did. Maybe this was exactly what was supposed to happen right now.

It was better than finding a hundred dollar bill in a coat pocket, though he couldn’t properly express it, his mouth feeling cotton-stuffed, packed with slurs. He left the door open for Chavez and crawled back in bed, took off his shirt. He was waking up, heating, anticipation growing like branches in every direction, a taut demanding feeling in the pit of his stomach because the last person he’d had sex with was also the next, rising on a straight line through the heart of the building at this very moment.

A gift, Chavez was delivered fully dressed and with only one thing on his mind, his hands all over Zito, speeding under his skin and trembling until Zito got him pinned down. There was a jerk in his chest, watching Chavez pant and squirm, his eyes solid black and begging.

A couple hours of summer, Zito thought distantly, and it might be enough to get him through December.

*

When pitchers and catchers reported to Phoenix, Zito stayed in the same condo complex as the rest of the guys who hadn’t brought or didn’t have families, under the flight paths near Mill Avenue. He kept getting confused because everyone’s place had the same floor plan, the same team photographs in different frames, the same green hoodies on the couch and huge TVs. Zito tried to unlock the wrong door at least once a week.

It was a new year and for those first couple of weeks the bare bones of the team appeared to be in unspoken agreement that the past was off limits. They talked about the season ahead and picked over every guy in the league, went out and got drunk and came back to the blue flutter of the pool, the elliptical thunder of the planes. They didn’t talk about anything that had happened before.

It was an incredible relief to Zito, a clean slate, sandlot do-over. He could cherry-pick his memory and ignore the bad stuff. It was like turning back the clock, for a long time now his only wish.

Hudson didn’t treat him like glass anymore, roughhoused with him in the dugout and tripped him on the clear green grass, razzed Zito’s head until his hair stuck up like an electrocution. Even Mulder had lost most of his sneer when he talked to Zito, the shadow of wounded bitterness receding in the killer sunlight.

The three of them went to an Indian casino after practice one day, just because they were bored and kicking around and nobody could come up with anything more interesting. More of the guys were supposed to come, but several flaked and others got sidetracked on the way and so Zito rode in the backseat, out of the conversation, gazing across the gold-scattered sprawl of the city.

Mulder only wanted to play blackjack, and Hudson wanted to get loaded and watch basketball in the sports book. Zito trekked back and forth between the two of them, cradling a string of identical jack and cokes, passing identical old women with snow-colored hair pumping money into the slots.

Mulder was playing rashly and without strategy, telling Zito over and over again, “I got a feeling about this one,” as he split aces, doubled down, placed hundred dollar side bets. The dealer could barely keep a straight face; the other people at the table didn’t bother trying.

Zito was no help, egged him on and waved the drink girl over for free refills. This wasn’t like Mulder, usually he took more care. Zito kinda wanted to see where it went.

“Help me, Rhonda,” Mulder said to the dealer for about the sixth time. Everyone rolled their eyes in unison, and Zito gave him a poke.

“Lame, dude,” he said. “Like she doesn’t hear that all the time.”

“It’s still funny,” Mulder replied, and then groaned when Rhonda the dealer broke him over a queen. “Shit.”

“It’s only funny if you’re drunk, I think.” Zito licked at the plastic edge of his cup, thinking that they should get actual glasses over here at the hundred dollar limit table. “And Rhonda’s not drunk, ‘cause she’s on the job.”

Rhonda agreed with a conspiratorial smile, tossed out three blackjacks and then busted, the whole table sending up a little cheer. Mulder grinned hugely, clicking stacks of chips together and stealing sips of his drink and Zito’s through a skinny red straw bit in his teeth.

“There should be a tournament with all the ballplayers,” Mulder said, leaning his elbow on the padded runner and tilting towards Zito. “Blackjack not poker, because it’s more about luck, right? And see if guys on good teams do better. It’d be proof that luck really exists. We can pinpoint this motherfucker, and then bottle it.”

Mulder was talking behind his hand for some reason, ducking his head close to Zito’s like a secret, and Zito covered his own mouth with his drink, tipping his face down.

“I’m not sure that would work.”

“Why not? Name a flaw, I dare you.”

Zito grinned. Sometimes he missed the fuck out of Mulder. “Well, winning is luck, but losing can be luck or stupidity. You really shouldn’t hit on that when she’s got a six showing, by the way.”

Mulder squinted at the other hands, shook his head. “No, I’m gonna. It’s gonna work.”

He promptly busted. Shortly after, Rhonda did too, and Zito hid his mouth again, this time to keep Mulder from seeing him laugh.

“Shit,” Mulder said again. “I wish Chavvy was here.”

The laugh caught in Zito’s throat and he started to cough, startled because he’d been thinking that on and off ever since getting down here, mostly in the vein of having baseball again and only needing someone to get off with to make it a perfect spring. But Mulder couldn’t read his mind and suddenly Zito felt very drunk, sure he was going to let something slip.

“How come?” he said, working to stay level.

Mulder sighed. “He actually is good luck. His grandmother gave him a strip of lottery tickets for his birthday when he was eight and he won nineteen thousand dollars.”

“No shit?” Zito said, surprised. “I never heard that.”

“Lotsa stuff I know about him you don’t.”

“Bullshit,” Zito said without thinking about it, and he bit his tongue in dismayed frustration; that was _exactly_ what he’d been trying to avoid.

“How’re you even arguing?” Mulder asked, sounding genuinely curious, foggy-eyed and listing towards Zito with every drink he took. “I lived with him, you gotta remember that because it was, like, a couple months ago at most.”

“No, you’re right.” Zito backpedaled frantically, clutching at the underside of the table. “I forgot the roommate thing for a second.”

“I know all about that guy,” Mulder said like he hadn’t even heard Zito. He wasn’t really paying attention to the game anymore. “I’ve seen him every way.”

“What.” Zito stopped himself, desperately second-guessing his judgment at the moment. All he wanted was to ask Mulder if Chavez had ever tried anything, what exactly had gone down in their quiet house, but he couldn’t, there was some huge reason why he couldn’t. “Um. You’re gonna live with him again?”

“Probably. The luck thing, it rubs off a little.”

Zito liked the idea of it, Chavez marked by fate and fortune like a glowing silver outline, leaving trails and brushstrokes of light on Zito’s hands. He’d always felt lucky himself, a theory direly threatened and then just as dramatically vindicated by his mother’s illness, and he wondered how many guys like that one team needed to go the distance.

“He never loses his keys,” Mulder said.

“He always wins coin flips, like without fail,” Zito offered.

“It’s annoying.”

Zito smiled. “Little bit.”

“What can you do,” Mulder sighed, slumping over on his elbow. He was in a drunk’s valley, waiting for his second wind. It was probably only coincidental, but it looked like talking about Chavez was physically draining him. “Explains the magic glove thing, too.”

“Well, that’s one that helps everyone.”

“Yeah.” Mulder paused, betting too much again and actually getting a blackjack, winning back fifteen minutes' worth of senseless losses. He hooted low, victorious and worn down. “You see that? I told you, man.”

“Yeah yeah.” Zito wanted another drink, wanted to talk about Chavez some more because he could picture him so clearly, standing between Mulder and himself buzzed and overexcited the way he got at casinos and arcades, bouncing on the balls of his feet and sloshing liquor on Zito’s back, leaning warm over Zito’s shoulder to shout at Mulder for being stupid.

Just a few more days, he thought, and immediately wondered where the fuck his head was. The whole point of Chavez was that he wasn’t gonna mean anything.

“You and him were hanging out a lot towards the end last year,” Mulder said, jarring Zito because they weren’t supposed to talk about last year.

“Um, I guess.”

“You definitely were. It was our little joke. Where’s Chavvy? With the spaz!”

Zito scowled, crossing his arms over his chest and pressing his hands flat and hard to his sides. Hold it together, he demanded. “That’s not a very nice thing to call me behind my back.”

“Pretty sure that was to your face.” Mulder snickered, obviously thrilled with how well he was doing.

“Your _face_ ,” Zito muttered, beet-red and unable to come up with anything better. Mulder laughed out loud, and Zito decided that talking about Chavez was actually the worst idea when he was this drunk. It did crazy things to him.

After a minute, Mulder contained himself, grinning and shaking his head, playing big again. He was already down thousands, treating it like Monopoly money and making all kids familiar with ketchup sandwiches wince.

“It’s weird, is all,” Mulder said. “You and him don’t have a whole lot in common.”

“That is, are you kidding me?” Zito put his drink down, sensing he was about to start gesturing violently. “We grew up like four miles apart. My dad remembers his dad from when I played him in Little League. His best friend caught for me at USC, bet you didn’t know that. And hello! We’re totally teammates now and our whole lives are the exact same.”

“Okay, jeez.” Mulder waved him off, more bugged than amused now. “Y’all are soulmates, got it.”

Zito froze, astonished and appalled by how every thing out of his mouth was the dumbest possible option. He finished off his drink to buy a moment to regroup, but all he could think about was how in a few seconds he was going to be too drunk to hide anything.

“We’re friends,” Zito said, collapsing back into media answers because he’d been way too well-trained. “Like you and me, friends.”

Mulder laughed. “You and me have never been _friends_ ,” he said with his mouth twisted, and then something flashed in his eyes, a moment of connection, revelation through the fog, and he looked sharply at Zito, some black accusation building.

Shifting uncomfortably, Zito narrowed his eyes. “What?”

Mulder didn’t answer right away, staring at him for a long moment and then slowly shaking his head. He rubbed his hand across his face, blinked down at his shrinking stacks of chips.

“Nothing. I think I’m really fucking drunk,” he said at last, and when he looked back at Zito there was just the usual veneer of resentment and dim reluctant fondness.

“Maybe you should stop gambling then, sir,” Rhonda came in, and all the other people at the table nodded emphatically.

“It’s not like it could make him play worse,” Zito pointed out, and Mulder took a swipe at him, almost falling out of his chair. Zito caught him around the shoulders and was surprised anew by the heft and breadth of Mulder, his slightly heroic dimensions.

They got to their feet, Mulder unsteady and hanging on Zito’s arm. Zito gathered his remaining chips and tipped Rhonda enough to forgive all sins, and led Mulder away. Once the head-rush passed, Mulder was mostly okay, walking upright on his own.

“It’s dangerous to underestimate people,” Mulder said out of the blue as they came up to the sports book.

Zito located Hudson where he’d left him, and then looked at Mulder. “Who?”

Mulder shrugged, looking like he already regretted saying it. “Anybody.”

“Oh-kay,” Zito said slowly, waiting for Mulder to elaborate, but he only shoved his hands in his pockets and walked across the manic pattern of the carpet to Hudson, who called his name joyfully because Auburn was winning, lifting his drink to Mulder standing over him.

Zito stood across from them for a long second, studying the scene that he would soon join as if with proper diligence he could somehow prepare himself for what was to come.

*

The fielders showed up and with them the natural state of the world. It was baseball season again. Half the roster was up for grabs, half the guys were new. Twenty-five men, nine positions, and a hundred and sixty-two games meant that the possibilities were mathematically endless.

Zito wasn’t too worried about his spot in the rotation, if anything troubled by over-confidence. He gave an interview around then to a disreputable-looking kid who might not have been from a newspaper so much as a website, in which he mentioned his general life goal: to be the greatest pitcher of all time.

The reporter kid had kinda laughed, which Zito didn’t get. He was now at the right level for greatest of all time, so why would he aim for less? Not to mention that if someone was scripting out the story and stats for the greatest of all time, Zito’d done pretty fucking well through twenty-two years old.

He asked Chavez about it later, sitting out by the pool watching the planes go by overhead, and Chavez told him:

“It’s a fine thing to go for, but usually people don’t say that out loud.”

“So they’re lying, is what you’re telling me.”

“It’s like diplomacy, man. You say what they expect because it makes their job easier and your job easier and hey! Everybody’s happy.”

Chavez held out his beer bottle for Zito to clink, but Zito left him hanging. They were in matching plastic deck chairs, sky stained purple and orange above a few sickly stunted palm trees. An ice-cream truck made its way closer gradually, sweet bell song rising and falling on the wind.

“You,” Zito said, pointing his bottle at Chavez, “have like seventeen records at your high school and also some state ones. You know who told me that?”

“Yeah, fuckin’ Munson. You know whose records I broke?”

“Yeah, fuckin’ Beane. So you can’t talk about not wanting to be the best.”

“Yo, I didn’t _try_. Awesomeness comes very naturally to me.”

Zito snorted a laugh, wrapping both hands around his beer and kicking at Chavez’s bare feet with his own, scuffling on the deck. There was a neat little peace in knowing that he was going to fuck Chavez tonight, one part of his life completely taken care of.

Everything had gotten better with Chavez’s return, but Chavez hadn’t come alone. Zito was conflicted, sure that he was mostly happy because of the season but still incredibly fond of sleeping with Chavez and possibly getting worse. It was hard to see where one ended and the other began.

“Anyway, high school was a long time ago,” Chavez said. “I don’t think you should be worrying about your place in history so much.”

“See, I don’t get that, because why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s not your legacy yet, it’s just your job. The big picture doesn’t actually exist, it’s only you thinking too much, and that’s very dangerous.”

Zito opened his mouth, then closed it again, thought a moment. “Telling someone to stop thinking about something is counterproductive, dude.”

Chavez grinned. “We’ll find some other stuff for you to think about.”

Like everything else Chavez said these days, it had three or four different interpretations and Zito chose the one that favored him most, pulled Chavez up the white cement stairs and down the narrow hallway, Chavez’s belt buckle branded into his palm, the backs of his fingers brushing soft heated skin.

Zito was having way too much sex and it put him in a philosophical frame of mind no matter what Chavez said. Chavez fell asleep right after and there were usually ten or fifteen minutes before Zito followed, reading the stucco hieroglyphs on the ceiling and watching the tremors and jumps under Chavez’s eyelids from six inches away.

It wasn’t possible to ignore the scope of things at moments like that, in the small hours of the morning with the streetlight cast over both of them to bronze the scene. The big picture was pointillism by way of statistics and innumerable minute details: every grass stain, every splinter off every broken bat, every frayed red thread of every busted stitch, every word he’d ever spoken to Chavez, every waking moment of the life he’d spent dedicated to baseball.

Zito had to believe that they were involved in something epic here, that the signs and omens had been right and he’d chosen the one true faith. Baseball was all the history he cared about, the only kind of hero he wanted to be.

*

That year, 2001, that was the first magic year.

Everyone could pitch and everyone could hit and everyone kept saying that the Mariners would have to slow down at some point, no one could maintain that pace for six months. It was an aberration that would have to be corrected soon, meet its match in a long downswing that would clear the way for the Athletics’ final run. But no one was worried about the playoffs yet, taken by the summer and living for the next pitch.

Zito was still trying to catch up to Mulder, frustrated beyond belief by the way Mulder kept just beating him, allowing one run to Zito’s two, a complete game to Zito’s eight innings. He complained to Chavez after hours that it wasn’t fair, it was like chasing a mechanical rabbit.

Chavez wouldn’t listen to much of it, reminding Zito that last year the positions had been reversed, Zito the rookie phenom and Mulder the injured and overrated bonus baby, and Zito changed the subject because he still didn’t want to talk about last year.

No matter that Mulder had apparently sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a ring or a plaque, Zito was pitching well enough himself, and they were winning all the time, insecurities lost the further they climbed into the black.

It kept him stuck in a celebratory drunk for weeks and made him act unpredictably. For whatever reason just the sight of Chavez was the meanest provocation, riled him up past sense. He had Chavez in alleys and bar bathrooms, hotel showers and under the covers with Eric Byrnes asleep on the floor. They went to a twofer movie one afternoon and Zito went down on him in the back row, smashed bits of popcorn stuck to his knees when the lights came up.

Chavez never told him no. It was almost like a dare, see how far Zito would push it. He still asked every time (“can I fuck you man say yes you gotta”), but it was becoming a given.

Zito wasn’t used to this. He’d been sleeping with Chavez for almost a year, if only in-season, and he was supposed to be bored with it by now. Pretty soon Chavez was going to be the person that Zito had slept with the most in his life, which was kinda mind-bending because sometimes Chavez still looked like a consolation prize to Zito, a fallback.

But he’d lost interest in anything that took more effort than winking at Chavez from across the room and getting his dick sucked five minutes later. His relations with Hudson had almost entirely normalized because Zito honestly couldn’t understand how he’d ever thought he’d had a shot. Hudson would take _decades_ of work and many more black eyes, and even then it probably wouldn’t have worked.

Hudson was just for looking, which suited Zito okay once he’d come to terms with it. It had been hubris to think otherwise, his judgment compromised by the miracles and meteoric ascent of his minor league year, but he was over that stuff now. He could still be the greatest pitcher of all time, but he couldn’t convert straight guys and it was dumb to try.

So Hudson was his best friend again, and Chavez was there for extracurriculars, and even if there was an undercurrent to his interactions with Mulder that indicated they were not totally done with each other just yet, Zito still thought that everything in his life should have gone as easily as that spring.

Chavez had given up on Mulder as sure as Zito had on Hudson, though he wasn’t sure if it was because Chavez was lazy too, or he’d finally realized that Mulder’s kind of dysfunction was contagious. It shook out to the same, a tinge of resignation in Chavez’s expression when he looked at Mulder, a crease in his forehead that appeared when Mulder was pitching, and sometimes when Chavez was asleep.

But he didn’t follow Mulder around anymore; more and more Zito and Chavez were an island in the flow of the team, camped out together in the corner booth, the smaller couch, the far end of the dugout. More and more it was just the two of them, locked in and set apart.

Something strange was happening, Zito decided at the 7-Eleven, where he’d stopped for a Slurpee to supplement breakfast and half filled a blue raspberry one for Chavez before he realized what he was doing. Chavez hadn’t asked for one; Chavez didn’t even know Zito was here.

Because it was already half done, and because Chavez obsessed about the blue raspberry with frightening strength, Zito filled the cup the rest of the way, stuck on a domed lid and topped it off. He carwrecked his own, mostly Coke and cherry with a few stray squirts of pina colada, and stood in line at the counter scanning the tabloid headlines and feeling both hands go numb, wondering how much trouble he was in.

Nine minutes later he pulled a chair over to Chavez’s locker and sat down across from him, a Slurpee on each knee. Chavez was buried behind the newspaper, gym-shorted legs visible, cracking his gum in that specific Southland way that always sounded like home to Zito.

“Ahem,” he said.

A corner of the newspaper flicked down and Chavez gave him a crooked smile. “Good morning.”

Zito smiled back helplessly, thinking, _so_ much trouble. Chavez wasn’t even trying, he wasn’t even doing anything. This was all in Zito’s head just like everything else, imagining a halo-glow at Chavez’s temples, making too much of things. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, and so he raised the blue Slurpee, not trusting himself to speak.

Chavez’s eyes lit up, the stone-gray wall of the newspaper crumpling and revealing him completely. For a moment it felt like the thing that had happened to Zito might be irreversible, but he knew that couldn’t be right.

This wasn’t like true love because it had come about so haphazardly and with so little grace. He and Chavez had stumbled over each other, settled for their second choices at the end of a long dry night, and no one was more surprised than Zito that it had lasted the road trip, much less the year.

It was pure coincidence that they fit as well as they did, that Chavez hadn’t freaked out and Zito hadn’t gotten bored. A one-in-a-million confluence of Zito’s rookie year and substance abuse problems, Chavez’s insecurity and recklessness, their matching chipped hearts and mirrored histories. None of it was by design; it was all just a one-night tangent that they’d followed blindly without thought to destination.

And if it wasn’t by design, Zito thought, then it came back down to plain dumb luck, and their faith in that might be another sort of love, if a little less than true.

*

Zito woke up late in the morning, overheated and hungover and Chavez was stuck in his mind like a song. He’d meant to see Chavez before going out to bars the night before, but the pre-game had become the game and he never got out of the city. Now it was as if he’d forgotten to pay his rent or appear for a court date or something, a pulse as he brushed his teeth: chavvy chavvy chavvy.

He was going to take a shower and grab some breakfast, but instead Zito found himself pulling jeans on over the boxers he’d slept in, tugging a beanie over the fallen haystack of his hair. Zito found himself zoned out in the elevator, trying to work out the details of the dream he’d been having five minutes ago, yawning compulsively.

The drive over the bridge whisked by, cornflower blue sky and streaks of colored metal, Zito dazzled by sunlight. He sang along to the radio, waking up little by little the closer he got to Chavez’s house.

Mulder and Chavez were in the kitchen when Zito came in, playing Battleship, and when Chavez looked up and smiled at Zito, it all suddenly made sense, why Zito had woken up with Chavez’s name echoing, why he had come out here without even having breakfast first. This was obviously the only place Zito was supposed to be.

Mulder torpedoed the hell out of Chavez’s battleship, and then left to go to the store, and Zito waited until the front door slammed before getting up and crossing the room, leaning against Chavez at the counter and nudging at his face until he lifted his mouth and let Zito kiss him. Zito sighed into it, feeling the world clicking along, snapping into place.

This was what he’d come for.

*

On a Tuesday morning in September, they were woken up just before dawn by the panicked sound of Chavez’s ringtone, dragging through Zito’s dreams and pulling him up.

He was hunched under the covers, his face against Chavez’s side. Dark enough that his sense of smell was heightened, salt and soap and Zito bit at smooth skin, felt Chavez jerk and yelp.

“Ansa y’phone,” he said muffled, and Chavez groaned and shifted, his side pulling taut. Zito rubbed his cheek, yawning and drifting, his eyes scratchy and aching so that he knew it was way too early.

He was lost reliving his last clear memory, Chavez coming back from the bathroom with his hands wet, sliding over Zito’s back and up into his hair so that cool damp tracks were left behind, slow brush of Chavez’s mouth on the back of his neck and Zito had fallen asleep.

Chavez’s voice was no more a murmur through the covers, but suddenly he said loudly, “ _What_?” and sat up so fast the blanket drew off Zito’s head and he was revealed at once, blinking and clutching at Chavez’s hip. Chavez didn’t look down at him, staring sightless and disbelieving.

Zito sat up. This could be big.

“But that’s restricted air space. You can’t fly there, you can’t get _close_.”

Chavez’s voice climbed until it hit a discordant high note, and Zito tugged at his elbow, fear gradually wrenching his stomach. Chavez waved him off, grabbed for the remote control on the table and turned on the television.

“Yeah, what channel?” and Zito leaned close, heard the staticky voice on the other end of Chavez’s phone say, “All of them,” and that was when Zito started to get really scared.

They spent the day like everyone else in the country who wasn’t attempting to flee a major metropolitan area, planted in front of the television as the story wrote itself out, horrific expressions on their faces, gaping at the black-shadowed people staggering in ones and twos through the hurricane of powder and paper. They watched the towers fall over and over again, the deliberate intractable approach of the second plane, small as a toy and aimed like a bullet at the seventieth floor.

“Jesus Christ,” Chavez said hollowly. He’d been saying that every few minutes; Zito didn’t think he was even fully aware of it anymore.

On the television, a woman was jogging into the massive cloud of pale contaminated ash that had enveloped lower Manhattan. She was shouting, is anybody hurt, does anybody need a doctor, and Zito thought about being buried under a hundred stories of debris, a whole new meaning of darkness.

He stood up abruptly. He couldn’t sit here and watch this anymore, this fucking snuff film with a cast of thousands. He couldn’t see the buildings come down again, couldn’t picture the skyline without them. In a day or two the smoke and dust would clear and the mutilated city would stand as tombstones instead of skyscrapers.

“Can we get out of here?” he asked Chavez, balling up his fists and trying not to show the mindless jumble of shock and dread and excitement that rioted in his blood.

Chavez looked at him in disbelief. “Where the hell do you want to go?”

“Somewhere without a TV?” Zito suggested.

“No fucking way. Are you nuts? This is the craziest shit in the history of _time_.”

“I know, it’s freaking me out, man.”

“No way. Sit down.” Chavez didn’t wait for him to comply, grabbing Zito’s belt and pulling him back down.

Zito slumped, half-covering his face with his hand. He thought about being trapped in one of those planes, terror-struck watching the New York skyline soar pass closer than anyone had ever gotten before. They must have known what was going to happen, and Zito thought about their last five minutes.

“They cancelled the games,” he said, just saying it out loud to see if it would make any more sense than it did in his head. “That’s never happened before.”

“Can you imagine?” Chavez said. “If somebody crashed a plane into a stadium instead?”

Zito shuddered. “Don’t talk about that, fuck. I don’t need shit like that in my head when I’m trying to pitch.”

They watched the coverage in silence for awhile. The mayor of New York was moving through the warzone, making sure everyone around him kept their filter-masks on. People kept materializing out of the dirty fog like zombies from the mist, streaked in filth and sometimes blood and sobbing, crooked paths of clean skin on their faces.

“I mean, it’s weird,” Chavez said, sounding detached. “Obviously they were targeting civilians because they’re evil and all, but if they were, why’d they go so early? In another hour there woulda been like ten times as many people. And the market would have opened too. You’d really think that they would have wanted to blow up the Stock Exchange.”

Zito shook his head. He felt like he might throw up pretty soon. “It was the symbol, like the Pentagon’s the symbol of the military. I don’t think it was about killing a whole bunch of people, that mighta just been a bonus for them.”

“Jesus,” Chavez said. He sat back, running a hand through his hair. “This is gonna be like when Kennedy was shot, huh?”

“I think.” Zito swallowed hard, watching the shaky handheld footage of a man who could be heard calling for survivors from behind the camera. “I think this might be worse.”

*

It was a new world after the 11th of September, but the year ended like an echo of the year before, like God couldn’t muster up another original tragedy after the one that had struck the city three weeks prior. It really did seem like He was going to give New York another set of rings, but nobody thought that was a good trade.

For the part of the underdogs, the A’s spent a week in the playoffs fighting déjà vu and losing anyway, and Zito wouldn’t have thought that living through the same pain twice would actually be worse the second time around, but there were whole other realms he’d never imagined.

Zito was supposed to be older and wiser, but when Tejada started crying in the tunnel after the game, he felt himself shrivel agonizingly back to eight years old, weeping into the tail of his muddied Little League jersey, powerless and immobilized by dismay.

He didn’t want to see anybody after that game, didn’t want anybody to see him, and as soon as he could escape Yankee Stadium, he got the hell out of the city.

Pacing the plains of the airport before his flight, counting the Yankee caps and feeling like he was suffocating, Zito let three calls from Chavez go by. His hand twitched and itched to answer, but he wouldn’t. This was the worst day ever and if he heard Chavez’s voice it might kill him.

He had a small pocketful of painkillers he’d cadged from the clubhouse, not entirely sure what dosage they were, but pretty certain three would do the trick. Waiting until the drink service, he chased the pills down with his first bloody mary, chased the peanuts with his second, and promptly fell asleep, which had been the hope.

He had to be shaken awake, the plane empty around him and the heavily made-up face of the flight attendant floating like a saucer above him. Both his feet were asleep and he hobbled out to the jetway, badly perplexed and digging into his pocket for his phone, his rickety mind insisting unsteadily, chavvy, chavvy, because Chavez would know where he was and what was going on.

But as it rang Zito emerged into the terminal and recognized LAX from its shabby retro-trash look, and he hung up on Chavez’s voicemail without leaving a message, remembering in a rush that he’d come home in defeat once again.

He spent a week not returning phone calls and worrying his family, holed up in his cruddy little apartment waiting for the walls to start closing in, and then Chavez showed up in his brother’s truck, and stayed for three days.

It was better than rain after a drought or sunshine after a blizzard, a reprieve from the dense settling off-season, and as long as Chavez was content to lie around in bed for hours at a time, Zito was content to keep him company. They watched M*A*S*H and Golden Girls and ordered in. They left the building only once over the long weekend, on a drugstore run that ended up with them making out in an alley for ten minutes because it was right near West Hollywood and no one knew them and it was okay.

The second morning they had Apple Jacks and milkshakes for breakfast and Zito asked him, “How long do I get?”

Chavez tipped his head to the side. “Until my brother’s threats reach a certain level of credibility.”

“Which brother’s truck did you steal?”

“Chris’s.”

Zito winced, shook his head. “Dude, don’t steal your _older_ brother’s truck.”

“Yes, I’m learning that. He’s got Dad on his side, is the problem. Casey would never fight dirty like that.”

“And where’s your car again?”

“Up in Oakland.”

“Convenient.”

“I’m only visiting,” Chavez said, pulling the straw out of his milkshake and licking it clean. He already looked better than he had when he’d arrived two nights ago, though they hadn’t gotten much sleep. He’d come in strung to the bone, jittering and clumsy, his arms locked around Zito’s body like they only had one parachute.

Chavez wasn’t all that was different in the light of day; even the yellowed print of the wallpaper looked brighter instead of faded, the old stained wood of the cabinets almost cheerily rustic. Zito hadn’t even put any vodka in his milkshake, but it still felt like a good day.

“You should stick around,” Zito told him, feeling like he could say anything. “What’ve you got in Oakland that’s so great?”

Chavez smiled, shrugged. “What’ve I got down here?”

“Oh, ha ha.” Zito kicked Chavez under the table. It was too beautiful a morning and he had to believe that Chavez felt the same as he did. “You can’t fool me, man, you stole a car to get here.”

Chavez laid his feet on top of Zito’s, pressing down to keep him from kicking and then just resting there. He gave Zito an imprecise grin, something that could be taken to mean almost anything, and Zito realized absently that he was holding his breath, waiting for Chavez to answer.

“How I got here is incidental,” he said. “I came by what means were available.”

It was a strange thing for him to say, but it appealed to Zito and he remembered it for weeks after Chavez had left, replaying it as often as he replayed finally getting to fuck Chavez in the shower. They were hundreds of miles apart but there would always be means available for Chavez to get to him—California would never run out of cars to steal.

So it was with a sense of mildly elated inevitability that Zito flew to Oakland early in December, crumpling his ticket jacket in his hands as he spotted the pearl-white ring of stadium lights around the Coliseum, wondering what it might mean. It was the day before Chavez’s birthday and Zito had called in every favor and friendship he’d forged since Randy Jones had been his adolescent pitching coach to get Chavez a baseball signed by the 1986 Padres. Zito had to keep it wrapped in three handkerchiefs and buried in his backpack so he wouldn’t be tempted to fiddle with it and smear the blue and black names.

The look on Chavez’s face when he opened the door to find Zito standing there was better than the look when he saw the baseball. Zito stayed six days, his mouth sticky-sweet from oranges, raw from overuse. He put his life on pause, begged off two gigs with his sister’s band, told his parents he was camping and couldn’t be reached. There wasn’t much left that was his alone, something that god willing would never show up on Sportscenter, and he felt obliged to sacrifice the outside world while he still could, fight for the little time he had.

They drowsed in patches of sunlight for whole afternoons, shared coffee half-naked in the kitchen, and Chavez continued their conversations in his sleep, mumbling where to turn and what to throw, and for the first time in Zito’s life, he thought that he might like to do this forever.

*

Chavez couldn’t hit for the first month of 2002, but he claimed not to be worried because he’d yet to play a decent April.

“It’s like how I’m not a morning person,” he explained to Zito. “I gotta break in first.”

It sounded pretty good, but Zito didn’t believe it. Chavez kept waking up earlier and earlier, not like Zito’s nightmares of thunder and disgrace, just a subtle full-body twitch and then a few seconds later he would slide out of bed and pad down the hall. He never tried to fall back asleep; he must have known it was no use.

Zito played along, trying not to make a big deal about his own rash of early-season success. He didn’t say anything about Chavez’s insomnia because then Chavez might ask about Zito’s own.

Zito’s sleeplessness was actually a good thing overall—he wasn’t passing out as much anymore, not going to bed obliterated on liquor and pills, thick dreamless sleep until the alarm penetrated. It was like losing his appetite when he’d stopped smoking pot on a regular basis, and he assumed it would pass in the same way.

It didn’t affect his play. Nothing, it seemed, could affect his play. It had been a continuingly upward path since he was five years old, and he tried not to think about how far he would go before the plateau, if it would ever come. The moment was all that was important.

He knew himself well enough to know that any failures he’d have would be psychological more than physical, so he kept music playing every second he wasn’t pitching or directly involved in a conversation, never let his mind get quiet enough to trip him up.

Zito honestly had no idea how long he would be able to keep this up, but he had high hopes.

Chavez helped by being around and not complaining when Zito disappeared into his headphones rather than talk to him. He’d zeroed in on his slow start, searching for his swing with ghost bats, his face pinched with concentration as he worked on his footwork in hotel elevators.

Zito watched him all the time, a worn peace in it because he’d seen Chavez take a million swings, even more groundballs, as calming and familiar as walking through his parents’ house in San Diego. He collected moments when the music matched up with Chavez’s movements perfectly, recognizing how instances of balletic coincidence could be seen as proof of God.

It worked too, and by the time the kids got out of school and summer _really_ began, Chavez had rediscovered his stroke and started putting baseballs over the wall in deep right-center, pummeling the wide open spaces of the outfield. He had a tendency to hit homeruns places where no fans were sitting, which Zito always made sure to point out to him.

“What say you end up breaking records?” he asked after Chavez had come in beaming and slapping hands, getting a cup of Gatorade and plopping down next to Zito. “Nobody will have a chance to catch it.”

Chavez shrugged, looking enormously pleased with himself. “So one of the grounds crew or stadium security or something will get it. I’d be cool with that.”

“I caught a Benito Santiago homerun ball in the bleachers at the Jack Murph once, did I ever tell you that?”

“Yeah, like nine hundred times.”

“Exactly! I’ve told it to, like, every third person I met because it was just that awesome, so now there’s this giant group of people who maybe follow baseball or maybe don’t, but will always associate him with homerun hitting, which is nice for Benny, I think you’ll agree.”

Chavez stretched his arms out along the back of the bench, laughing a little. Stretched all the way out like that, it didn’t look weird that his arm was resting on Zito’s back, a trick they’d picked up two years ago.

“Well, maybe Benny can aim homeruns wherever he wants, but I’m generally just happy to get it over.”

“Sure,” Zito nodded. “First things first, of course. I just think it’d be nice for your runt army to have homerun balls as relics.”

Chavez had a runt army because he was far and away the majority pick of the under-ten crowd, hundreds of them in replica jerseys chasing him around the bases on the first Sunday of every month. Zito could tell it surprised him, as Chavez had never considered himself particularly good with kids, but he weathered it well and hardly ever cussed in front of them anymore.

They were quiet for a minute watching Terrence Long beat out an infield single, and then Zito said, not wanting to be misunderstood:

“It was a beautiful shot, though.”

Chavez’s smile returned full-force, though he didn’t look over at Zito, his eyes on Terrence dancing off the bag. “Yeah.”

“It’d be wicked cool if you did it next at-bat too.”

“Yeah?” Chavez dropped his arm over Zito’s shoulder, palm flat on Zito’s chest, pressed flush against Zito’s side and Zito leaned into him hard, knowing they could only sit like this for a moment or two.

Zito grinned to himself, warm under Chavez’s arm and feeling him chuckle, feeling the season coming together like gears notching together. This happened every spring, when there were more months ahead of them than behind, and nothing seemed out of the question.

*

In August, they started to win and for a long time, they didn’t stop.

Twelve games into the streak, Zito threw a party as a complicated sort of talisman against the thirteenth, which everyone agreed would be a tougher win than the rest. They’d been staying together longer and longer every night, better protected in each other’s company, haunting bars until close and driving around in search of higher ground, and a party would at least keep them off the streets.

Zito was living in Pacific Heights that year, white-faced building with long balconies and high windows facing the bay, and Chavez got a ride with him from the ballpark because he finally had a genuine excuse to sleep over at Zito’s house. They walked down a shallow hill to the liquor store and Chavez bought as much candy as alcohol, his pockets stuffed and a white plastic Chupa Chup straw sticking out of his mouth.

It was a strawberry Chupa Chup, Zito found later when he pushed Chavez up against the refrigerator and kissed him deeply for several minutes because he wouldn’t be able to for the next few hours. Zito had his palms on the sides of Chavez’s throat, rush of blood and Chavez breathing raggedly when they broke apart, his eyes flashing black.

People started showing up right after that, and Chavez and Zito got separated, winking at each other from across rooms, involved in different conversations and storylines. Half the team was there and Zito was trying to get them as blitzed as possible, his recipe for a successful event.

He went back to the kitchen to get himself another beer, and caught Mulder at the table saying to John Mabry, “It’s stupid to think that the number thirteen is unlucky because numbers are just abstract concepts.”

“So’s luck,” Zito said immediately, not liking Mulder’s superior tone of voice.

Mulder leveled a glare at him. “Luck is a force like gravity, it’s not a human construct.”

“Dude, you can’t compare luck and gravity. You can _see_ gravity.” To demonstrate, Zito plucked the cap off Mabry’s head and dropped it on the floor. Mabry, swaying and muddy-eyed, felt the top of his head curiously.

“You can see luck, too,” Mulder argued, though he looked like he was losing his stomach for it, defiant for the sake of bugging Zito. “Every time someone wins the lottery.”

Zito rolled his eyes. “That’s just odds. Somebody’s gotta win.”

“Same thing. Probability just puts numbers to it.” Mulder waved his hand, dismissing the topic, and leaned down, getting Mabry’s cap off the floor and handing it back to him. Mabry looked badly startled, like Mulder had conjured it out of air. “You look like you need another, Johnny, and you should get me one too.”

Highly suggestible, bribed by his own cap, Mabry got to his feet, bobbing his head and listing hard to the right. Zito took his seat, stretching his legs under the table and letting them collide with Mulder’s as if by accident. Mulder drew his feet in, sitting up and giving Zito a distrustful look.

“I gotta say,” Mulder told him, “if you’re gonna make everybody pay a fucking toll to come hang out at your place, you’re really gonna have to lay in better beer than this.”

Zito was affronted. “This is great beer. You’re just a snob, you don’t like it ‘cause it’s not all expensive and imported.”

Mulder sneered, looking out of place because he’d never been in Zito’s kitchen before. “Not true at all, man.”

“Whatever.” Zito crossed his ankles under the table, enjoying the feeling of having won the leg room over Mulder. “You knew about the toll when you decided to come, and it’s not polite to complain about the beer when it’s free.”

Mulder made a derisive sound, but came up with no retort, rising instead and leaving the table without another word, crossing the room to where Mabry stood stymied in the frozen wash of refrigerator light, and Zito glared at Mulder’s back until he left the room. He’d wanted more of a fight than that.

The kitchen emptied soon thereafter, Zito alone at the table sipping his beer with sullen pride. It was almost gone, and when it was he’d get another and go back to the living room where the others were, but before that happened Hudson came in.

“Kid,” he said, looking surprised to see Zito, likely having forgotten whose house he was at. A couple seconds later he smiled, and Zito remembered a time when there’d been no delay.

“You like the beer, Huddy, right?” Zito asked as Hudson opened the refrigerator and doused his front in chill ice-blue light.

Hudson shrugged. “Yeah, s’alright. Got me nice an’ tanked, for sure.” He took out a can and cracked it, took a long pull and then gave a satisfied smack, holding up the can with a spokesman’s cheesy smile. “4 out of 5 ballplayers agree that PBR gets you major league drunk.”

Zito snickered. “Dude. That would be the best commercial ever.”

“Right? I’d buy me a truckful.”

Hudson was grinning big and Zito felt a phantom pain at the sight of it, a sympathy ache for the man he’d been a couple of years ago who’d been so often and totally wrecked by that kind of thing. The distance of the feeling surprised him, realizing anew that it had literally been years, twenty-four months and three seasons, and he wasn’t the man of his twenty-second year any more than he was his nineteenth. He was a lighter drinker, a heavier sleeper, kinder and calmer and a better pitcher. He was, for better or worse, no matter how it began or how it would end, in love with Eric Chavez.

It must have been past midnight, because Zito was feeling sentimental and at peace with his life in a way that he couldn’t remember ever being before. He wanted to make sure Hudson knew that everything was okay, everything was going to go exactly like they dreamed. They were still best friends; Hudson had to see that.

Zito stood up, caught Hudson’s eye. “You know how I used to, that thing?” he said, which wasn’t exactly how he wanted to start, but Hudson could read Zito’s meaning, his expression going guarded.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hudson said.

Zito smiled nervously. “Well, I just. I didn’t mean it. I was a little fucked up, but I’m not anymore.”

Hudson smirked, not wanting to let Zito make it too serious. “Not fucked up anymore? Don’t think I believe you, babe.”

Zito’s stomach clutched, and his face must have shown it because Hudson got uncomfortable suddenly, looking away from Zito. Zito had already lost most of his forward momentum, sure that bringing this up had been a good idea a minute ago, not at all sure why.

He went on the defensive, wanting to get Hudson’s eyes back. “What? You don’t know. It’s been awhile, actually, and I wasn’t just gonna be stupid and fucked up over you forever, ‘cause I got a life.”

Hudson gave him a complicated look of distraught anger, and Zito couldn’t help the crazy little laugh that strangled in his throat. “Oh shit, I _mentioned_ it,” he said, feeling kinda mean because Hudson looked so stuck, mute and helpless. “I broke the golden rule.”

Hudson kicked his heel into one of the lower cabinets, making it clap sharply and cutting Zito off, which was probably for the best.

“Be quiet,” Hudson told him plainly, and Zito hushed immediately, sensing that he’d once again taken things too far. “You’re sayin’ stuff you’ll regret.”

That was true, but Zito could still fix it, he was sure. “But, listen, Tim, will you listen to me for a second? I wanted you to know so you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have to worry. I’m not gonna try anything or anything. I’m not like that anymore.”

Hudson scowled. “Well, good for you, man, congratulations and shit. Fuck.”

“You’re mad at me?” Zito asked, bewildered. He never understood anything.

“No.” Hudson looked like he didn’t necessarily believe that, but he let out a breath, eyeing Zito. “Quit lookin’ at me like that.”

“Sorry,” Zito said automatically in a fast mumble, not changing his expression because he didn’t know how, it was just his face, and he didn’t know which of the crush of emotions Hudson found hard to bear. “I’ll never do it again, is all. I wanted to promise you that.”

Hudson let his head fall down and to the side a little, gave Zito a tired and forgiving look. “Good,” he said, his forehead lined and his mouth bent down, and there was a pause before he added almost as an afterthought, “You don’t have to promise me anything.”

It touched Zito deeply for some reason, almost like he was gonna cry, and so he went back to his bedroom and lay down, blinking at the ceiling and wondering how he could feel the loss of something he’d never had.

After a few minutes, there was the quiet sound of the door snicking open, and Zito knew without looking that it was Chavez, because anyone else would have either barged in drunkenly or knocked.

Zito was still feeling strange, and Chavez’s presence was a mixed blessing at best, brought shame along with a sense of comfort, but he didn’t mind the implication when Chavez locked the door and came to stand over him. Looming like a spectre on a deathbed, Chavez had his hands buried in his pockets, his face unsure.

“Rough night?” he asked, and Zito turned his face away rather than answer.

Zito was sick of being reminded that Chavez had been a second choice because Hudson wouldn’t have him. He was happy like he was, secure in thunderstorms and fearful only that the doubt might return, the falter in his step. Even if Chavez didn’t, couldn’t hold it against him, Zito still worried about their desert-built foundation and the fickle nature of the game.

The bed gave as Chavez climbed onto his knees, passed his hand down the long line of Zito’s body before pressing his fingers into Zito’s side. He heard Chavez take a deep breath, like physical contact with Zito was a conduit of some kind, a passage.

*

Then there was a fever in the air, a temperature spike in the middle of September that sideswiped them all. Indian summer, everyone said again and again, but putting a name to it didn’t help Zito sleep at night.

People got short-tempered in the heat, even though they were winning and they were going to the playoffs, petty nothing fights blew up in corners of the clubhouse, over the spread, echoing in the parking garage. Zito learned to keep his head down after Mulder almost took it off when Zito had the impertinence to ask him what pitch the homerun to Ramirez had been.

There was an upside, though, as Chavez was following Zito home most nights on the claim that Zito’s air conditioning was superior, and then hanging around on the balcony without a shirt on anyway, resting chilled bottles of beer on his stomach so that there would be cold patches for Zito to lick across.

They slept without the sheets on the bed, sprawled apart from each other but usually Zito woke up with his wrist crossing Chavez’s or their feet laid side by side. Early in the morning a shivery oceanic wind would start them moving and they’d do something to get warm.

Zito couldn’t fall back asleep like Chavez always did after sex, up for good at dawn every day and feeling it heavily late in the evening, before his second wind kept him on past midnight. It was like uppers and downers again, free-form insomnia from constant travel, but Zito knew it wasn’t a problem until it affected his pitching, which was being regularly called untouchable, impervious, historic.

Sleep wasn’t much to lose. Zito was really enjoying being awake these days.

He was over at Chavez’s house the night before the heatwave broke, the maddening spiral climb of the humidity and the electricity in the air. It made them both act out of character, sniping at each other, trading jabs and malicious grins. Zito wasn’t sure if they were intentionally playing up the drama of the moment or if the heat had actually turned them.

They were in Chavez’s room, window cocked open for the spare stirrings of the wind, and Zito could feel individual beads of sweat rolling down the back of his neck, appreciating the momentarily cool tracks left behind.

Chavez brought him back to their semi-fight by calling him a cocksucker, but not like it was a good thing, and Zito said, “How is that an insult to me? It’s a talent, you know, and I appreciate the acknowledgement.”

Chavez scoffed, sitting in his desk chair with his legs stretched and crossed in front of him. “You’re okay. Nothing special, really.”

“Taught you ninety percent of what you know, but whatever.” Zito leaned back on his elbows on the bed, giving him an honest leer. “Whyn’t you come over and we’ll see who’s better?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”

“Dude, of course I would. When have I ever not?”

Chavez grinned quickly before shielding it and getting to his feet. Anticipation curled in Zito’s stomach, a thrill that was at once familiar and surprising, always forgetting in the interim exactly how dark Chavez’s eyes got when he was looking at Zito this way.

Rough, Zito thought, his thoughts already fracturing as Chavez yanked off his T-shirt one-handed, quick as he could. It was going to be fast and incautious because the tension had been there all day, every moment, hothoused and aggravated and finally unleashed. It was going to be very good, he could tell.

Chavez slid against him, trying to pin him down but his hands were slick and Zito was tricky, twisting up and kissing Chavez until his grip slackened. Zito closed his arms around Chavez’s neck, trying to press them together, one out of two.

Chavez’s mouth and teeth flashed on Zito’s throat, stuttering and swearing. Everything tasted like salt. The bed breathed heat, and they did too. Zito could imagine a fog growing around them, lit from within by the crazy shine of Chavez’s skin, holding the two of them together in place.

Zito asked his usual desperate question and Chavez gave the same answer he always did, and Zito was starting to lose his mind at that point, rubbing up against Chavez and trying to remember how to work his hands. Chavez helped him along, laughed when Zito muttered about those golden hands, and then Zito couldn’t see anything but the long stretch of Chavez’s back, his own hand locked on Chavez’s shoulder, dragging through the damp mess of Chavez’s hair.

Forever, was what he was thinking, could do this forever, dangerous talk but Zito let it drum through his mind, let it fill him up.

Then Mulder came in, a sudden shout, “ _Fuck_!” breaking the matched torn rhythms of Chavez and Zito’s breathing. Zito snapped his eyes over long enough to see Mulder standing in a column of light with an expression of perfect appalled shock on his face, half a second before Mulder slammed the door and Chavez wrenched away from Zito in the most painful way possible.

Fallen on his side on the bed, his fists pressed low into his stomach, Zito heard Chavez asking in a panic, “Who was that? Who was that?” and Zito shut his eyes fast, clenching his teeth and barely able to say woodenly, “You know who that was.”

He didn’t move as Chavez leaped to his feet and threw on jeans and ran after Mulder. He felt as stunned as Mulder, shaken down to the core of him because somewhere along the line he’d forgotten that the outside world could intrude on him and Chavez at moments like these.

“Mark!”

Chavez was shouting, and through the open window Zito heard the pound of his feet across the brief wooden porch, his short jump onto the path. He didn’t know what Chavez was thinking, going out there—confrontation could only make the thing worse. No way would Mulder ever forgive them for this.

Out in the yard, Mulder and Chavez were arguing pointlessly about why Mulder was home so early, and there was a jagged note of warning in Mulder’s voice, edge of violence begging Chavez not to push him. Zito couldn’t believe that Chavez couldn’t hear it.

Mulder said, “I don’t know why you think I care. You spent the first couple of months trying to fuck _me_ , man, I knew you were. I knew all about you.”

Zito reeled slightly, having given up on that particular mystery a long time ago, and he wished he could see Chavez’s face right now, see how bad the damage was.

Not done, Mulder continued, “You’re a fucking idiot, though. Barry Zito? How fucking drunk are you?”

Zito flinched, sat up because he wanted to hear what Chavez would say, how he would defend them.

“I’m not drunk,” Chavez said. “It’s never been ‘cause I was drunk.”

Tactical mistake, Zito knew immediately, a mental error that couldn’t be scored, and a second later Mulder asked with halting genuine surprise, “Wait, what’re you—more than once? You’ve done that more than once?”

Don’t tell him! Zito shouted helplessly and without sound, balling his fists in the sheets and casting his mind out there to Chavez standing up to his ankles in grass. Pleading with him, leave it, you can’t fix it. Cut and run and maybe get out alive.

But Chavez only knew the most recent half of the story, no sense of how far back the history between Mulder and Zito went, nor of the sincere and faithful animosity that Mulder now held for Zito, Mulder’s persistent wish for Zito’s downfall to vindicate the calamity Zito had once made of Mulder’s tidy life. Chavez was working off a completely different script, headed towards a wholly new ending.

“For years,” Chavez said almost too low for Zito to make out. “We’ve been doing it for years. Since he was a rookie, since you were. It’s been like this since the very start.”

Stupid, so stupid, and Zito curled over his knees, honestly scared of what Mulder might do.

“That long?” Mulder asked after a moment of stunned silence. “But he’s. He’s nothing. How can you even take him seriously?”

Zito straightened up again, his heart galloping because Chavez would get mad, rise up and tell Mulder to watch his fucking mouth, he wouldn’t let anybody talk about Zito that way. Zito held his breath, wondering if Mulder would take a swing in response.

But instead, instead Chavez was saying too loudly, his voice ringing, “I didn’t say I took him seriously, I just said I fucked him. That’s not the same thing at all.”

Zito thought he must have misheard. He shook his head sharply and put a fist to his mouth, squeezing his eyes shut.

“God, Eric, what does it fucking _matter_?” Mulder’s voice broke. “You don’t need my approval or something. You want to believe he’s worth more than he is, then fine.”

“I know exactly what he’s worth,” Chavez shouted, and Zito thought, please, please don’t say it, no use at all as Chavez continued, “What’s so bad about wanting anything instead of nothing?”

It hurt as much as anything in half a decade had, hearing Chavez say that. Zito felt like he’d been gashed across the chest, losing arterial blood and getting weaker by the second, both hands pressed flat to his heart as if he could hold it in. A roar built in his mind, tidal wave of recrimination and fury, black remorse as deep as a lake, because Zito was the stupid one, he’d set himself up.

He got dressed in a mindless daze, his face wrenched, mouth half-open because he could hardly breathe. Small steps, small pieces, get your shoes on and push your pockets back in, check for your keys, trying to focus on the route to the highway, the flight over the bridge home, trying not to recognize this moment as the end of anything.

Zito was sitting on the bed again when Chavez came back in, staring into space and trying to work up the courage to leave the bedroom when he was pretty sure he’d never enter it again. Chavez looked punch-drunk and violently dismayed, searching for his footing with his dark eyes landing on Zito, beseeching him.

It made Zito sick.

“He, um. He didn’t take it very well,” Chavez said.

“I know,” Zito said as coldly as he could manage. “I heard.”

He inclined his head towards the window and watched the realization jerk through Chavez’s body, his eyes bugging and his mouth falling open. A savage burst of anger shot through Zito, and he wanted to scream, _how could you say that, how could you lie like that_ , and then he wanted to hit Chavez in the face for a long time, but for now he had to get the fuck out of the room.

He got to his feet without looking at Chavez, mumbling, “I’ll see you around, man,” and Chavez’s mouth moved silently a few times, but there was nothing but cricket noise and the terrible suffocating thought of tomorrow. There wasn’t anything Chavez could say, anyway, no fix for this one, and Zito couldn’t stand hearing him try.

His vision was blurring, doubling up, and Zito thought he might be crying, stumbling across the front lawn and tripping just shy of the sidewalk, falling hard onto his hands and knees. He was shaking so profoundly he didn’t think he could work the key, much less drive, and he couldn’t stay here on Chavez’s lawn forever, Chavez would never let him inside again.

Please, Zito thought in keening agony, this is the worst moment and I know that now so please god let it be over soon.

*

The rest of the season was torture. Zito won twenty games, then twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three, and people said his name in the same sentence as Pedro Martinez’s on a daily basis, and everyone agreed that they were going to win the pennant at least, October shining before them bright as a sword, but Zito didn’t sleep three days straight, didn’t spend an hour sober for four.

It was all very familiar, snapped back to the bad old ways and the little green pills, snow-white painkillers and cocktails in every color of the rainbow. Back to lying flat on his back on the floor under the window, too tired to move and too tweaked to sleep, too drunk to think linearly, watching the night sky paling and tinting pink as the sun rose. Back to paranoia and anxiety and cabin fever, growing slowly to hate his apartment every time he woke up to find himself alone, every time he caught the lingering scent of Chavez’s shampoo in his shower, every time he found a bottle cap of Chavez’s brand.

Back to the bad, and into the worse, because they lost in the first round of the playoffs for the third year in a row, and the last bit of Zito’s control shredded. He’d locked himself into baseball just like he always did when his life started to veer dramatically off track, trusting the game to keep its structure even if everything else fell apart, but it failed him for the first time, kicking him while he was down hard enough to break ribs.

Zito couldn’t even tell if he was drunk anymore by the end of the fifth game, but he must have been because he started to cry before they even got out of the dugout. Appalled at the sudden burst of tears, a thick pressure jamming behind his eyes, Zito covered his face with his cap, hunching forward.

It wasn’t fair. He’d already lost too much.

Somebody’s hand closed on Zito’s shoulder, and Zito reached up instinctively, took hold of a strong wrist and held on, solid and warm and beating a pulse in soft veins, comforting in a very small way.

“C’mon, kid,” Hudson’s voice said from above. “Let’s get you off-camera, all right?”

Zito nodded, letting the cap fall off his face and looking up at Hudson nakedly. Hudson’s eyes were swollen and bruised-looking, his mouth in a rigid knot, and Zito thought that this repeated trauma wasn’t healing with the passage of time like it was supposed to. It was the same wound and it only ever scabbed over before October ripped it open again, tearing deeper each year and nearing vital organs.

Hudson took him into the tunnel and halfway down it another wave of grief battered over Zito without warning, and he ended up crying too hard to walk. Hudson mostly carried him into a trainer’s room, sat next to him with his arm slung across Zito’s bent shoulders, not saying anything and not moving as Zito wept, just keeping his arm steady and sure.

Everything was collapsing inward and the debris was mixing so that Zito couldn’t tell which part of his despair was the Minnesota Twins’ doing and which was Chavez’s. He wasn’t allowing himself to think about Chavez but now he couldn’t think about baseball either—it was like pillars being knocked out from under his sanity.

He was going to be alone for the next four months, and he was honestly starting to fear for his own safety.

He stayed in Los Angeles until the World Series was over, drinking away the parts of the day he couldn’t sleep away and spending too much time in West Hollywood. His sister’s band was on tour so their house was all his, but Zito stayed in his bedroom almost all the time he was home, needing more than one locked door between him and the rest of the world.

One typical afternoon, Zito was lying on the carpet with a block of tangible sunlight laid across him from neck to knees, a curiously dense heat sinking into his chest. He was remarkably stoned, watching the thin winding smoke trail up from the jay in his hand, and the abrupt jangle of his phone made him jerk, a black curl of ash falling onto his stomach.

Setting the jay aside, he groped around above his head to locate his phone and answered it without looking at the display.

“Zito. How’s it going?”

Beane. Zito let out a breath. “Pretty bad, man, how’s by you?”

“Terrible, just fucking awful. Fucking Angels. Are you in L.A. still?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, pack up, ace. You gotta come back.”

Zito was used to Beane talking like people could read his mind, giving orders without context or rationale. Usually Zito interpreted him pretty well, but he was way too stoned and all the possible explanations that filled his mind were improbable and traumatizing (Chavez was still in Oakland—he’d been killed—in a car crash—in a shooting—an undiagnosed heart defect—there would be a funeral—the team in black-shirted suits and little kids bawling in dark green jerseys—Zito couldn’t, he wouldn’t, there was no way), so he asked directly:

“Why? What happened?”

Beane coughed briefly, conspiratorially, before saying, “You might be having a press conference on Tuesday.”

Zito puzzled over that, his smothered memory sparking feebly. Something was happening on Tuesday, he knew that, but what was it? He wasn’t any good at keeping track of events in the off-season, especially not this year, every day smeared into the next, obscured by a dull gray fog.

“Um. Remind me what’s Tuesday?”

There was a pause, and then Beane said, his tone sharper, “The Cy Young, Zito. And if you’re fucking smoking weed again I’ll ship your ass back to the minors so fucking fast.”

“What? No way!” Zito said, casting a desperate guilty look at the jay smoldering on the carpet, and then the first thing Beane had said penetrated and he sat bolt upright, blinding himself with sunlight.

“I have to come back for the Cy Young?” he asked, his heart jerking in his chest.

“Maybe,” Beane said. “You have to come back because there’s a good chance.”

“Holy shit.” Zito fell back on his back, his vision glittering and exploding white stars. Towards the end of the season, the reporters had started trying to prepare Zito for it, but he must not have really believed them, or been too fucked up to process it, because this came as a complete shock. It didn’t seem possible for any good to come of this season.

So he went back to Oakland and stayed in the same hotel he’d lived in his first season up, and on Tuesday he won the Cy Young Award, faced once again with blank staring camera eyes and pencils scribbling down everything he said. Beane tried to make him put on a shirt with a collar before the press conference, but Zito refused. He wasn’t going to be any more uncomfortable than necessary.

Beane himself took Zito out to celebrate that night, but when Zito finished his fourth drink right before Beane finished his second, the evening got awkward. Beane started glaring at him and it only made Zito drink faster, sullen and contrary as a teenager, shooting Beane big fake smiles and toasting every man on the team.

Beane cut him off after only an hour or two, curtly calling to settle their tab without asking Zito if he was ready to go, but it wasn’t a problem. Zito had liquor back at his hotel and the sooner he was shook of Beane, the sooner he could drink it freely and without guilt.

Zito slipped off the curb trying to hail a cab, and he stood in the gutter chortling at how drunk he was until Beane grabbed his elbow and hauled him back onto the sidewalk. Beane kept his hand clamped on Zito’s arm, asking him heatedly:

“What the fuck is the matter with you?”

Zito laughed out loud, shaking his head. “Narrow it down at least.”

“Have you been drinking like this ever since the division series?” Beane’s face was livid, his eyes as black as Chavez’s.

“I’ve been drinking like this since I was seventeen years old,” Zito told him, still laughing a little and infuriating Beane further. “I’m like a goddamn fish, Billy, you have no idea.”

“Don’t fuck around with me, kid.”

Zito flinched hard, pulled away from Beane sharply as Hudson’s incensed face burst into his mind. He didn’t want Beane to become one more person that Zito wasn’t good enough for; Zito couldn’t imagine being made to leave this team, no matter how it had maimed him.

“I’m not,” he said, feeling powerless, much too young. “I go up and down. Always have. And right now I’m down.”

Beane narrowed his eyes, sensing that Zito was dissembling at least a little bit. “’Cause of the playoffs? This is just November shit?”

Zito hunched into his shoulders, not looking at him. “Yeah.”

“Hey.” Bright stab of anger in one syllable, and Zito looked up automatically, carefully meeting Beane’s eyes. “Are you fucking lying to me?”

Zito shook his head, not speaking. All his energy went to holding Beane’s eyes and not letting his true condition show on his face.

“You never do this in season.”

It wasn’t a question or a demand, just a statement of fact, reality as Beane ordered it. Zito nodded, thinking that he had hid it from Beane for this long; he was in no real danger.

“And if you’re fucked up or, what, _down_ , fucking talk to somebody instead of a bottle, huh? Don’t you have a therapist?”

Zito shook his head, relaxing slightly because Beane had moved on to Zito’s well-being, having dealt with the team’s. “Used to, but not anymore.”

“Remedy that. In fact, don’t come to Phoenix without a letter from one saying you’re sane.”

Zito laughed, surprised, and Beane grinned at him for a second before schooling his face again.

“Seriously,” he told Zito. “It gets tougher now. That fucking plaque? Sometimes it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to the guy. Sometimes it fucks him up forever after.”

Zito nodded but he wasn’t very worried. None of the various tragedies he’d suffered since starting professional baseball had managed to touch his game. As unstable as he’d always been, it’d been his one constant, his tether.

Baseball was the foundation on which everything else was built. If his pitching started to go, Zito knew, there would be no hope for him. It was his last good thing.

*

It was a horrific winter, full of freak-out drunks and bathroom floors, anguish and crippling regret every morning. There were hooded guys in the corners of bars who sold him lipstick-red bennies by the five-count, the first speed Zito had ever had that wasn’t supplied by his team. He oriented himself around the next drink, next jay, next pill. He did his workouts first thing in the morning, striving through punishing hangovers so that he could waste away the rest of the day.

All winter, he fought the sensation of water rising, of being chained in place and waiting to drown for months on end. Almost hoping for it, feeling the encroaching dread, the _anticipation_ , take him over like a cancer, eating him from the inside out. Surely there were better ways to die.

He could hardly ever remember his dreams, but the ones he could all featured Eric Chavez. Strange plotlines, Chavez and Zito laying railroad track down the baselines, Chavez making out with a waitress at the Coastway Diner, Mulder firing pitch after pitch aimed directly at Chavez’s head while Zito tried to scream in the dugout, untongued and immobile, dream-trapped watching in terror as Chavez ducked out of the way slower each time.

It was the only part Chavez played in his life, because Zito was staying constantly fucked up in order not to think about him, conditioning himself to flinch and look away every time his eyes caught on Chavez’s face in his photos, filling his mind with song lyrics every time he thought of him.

Zito knew that he’d have to sober up eventually, before he went to Phoenix because Beane would be looking for it now, and he dwelled on that inevitable day from time to time, wondering just how complete the wreckage of his life would be once he could see it clearly again. He pictured fallen cities, charred steel skeletons and buildings reduced to a narrow pyramidal intersection of two walls, great chunks blown out of the street so that the veinwork of cables and subways was revealed.

In January, the ragged red crosses on Zito’s calendar marching ever closer to Valentine’s Day, he got back from the afterhours club at six in the morning, wired past sense and trembling like an old man. In the darkened kitchen he drank glass after glass of water, frozen supernovas sparkling on the backs of his eyelids and his chest burning.

He wasn’t going to be able to sleep, so he fixed himself a thermos of screwdrivers and took it up to the roof to watch the sunrise. It was sneakily cold and Zito’s head was aching in a slow steady rhythm that kept his thinking surprisingly lucid.

The sky lost density as the night paled away. For about twenty seconds, a sliver of the sun was just visible in the east and a few dimming stars still clung over the ocean, a moment of perfect balance between night and day.

Zito felt scraped clean, wide-eyed watching the dawn break over the mountains, and he thought he understood then. This degenerate winter was not a reaction to Chavez’s betrayal of him, because he’d been a degenerate before he’d met Chavez, an asshole drunk obsessed with his kinder past, just like now. Living like this wasn’t the exception, it was the rule.

Chavez had just saved him from it for a couple of years.

*

Zito met with his old therapist twice, the bare minimum to get her to sign Beane’s letter for him. He told her it didn’t mean anything, just a precautionary measure because of the Cy Young, the supposed pressure of greatness, but it didn’t really seem like she believed him. The uncomfortable awareness that she was much smarter than him was one of the reasons he’d stopped seeing her in the first place, so he was just trying to get it over with as quickly as possible.

In the last session, she’d asked him about his teammates, if he’d call them friends or co-workers.

He answered immediately, “Friends. Brothers.”

Lifting an eyebrow, she asked, “All of them?”

Zito nodded, sipping his glass of Sprite. His therapist’s eyes narrowed like she knew he’d done it to avoid answering aloud. Zito could not win with this woman.

“Obviously I like some better than others.”

“Obviously.”

“I mean, there’s Tim. He’s a pitcher too, he’s pretty much my best friend. And Eric Byrnes, he’s this ridiculous guy I can’t even explain. Piatt and Ramon and JD and Mark Ellis, stand-up fellas all around. It’s really a good group.” Zito was proud, perfect casual voice, nothing to see here.

“It’s got to be unnerving, then,” she said, and Zito looked at her suspiciously, nothing revealed by the steady gray eyes behind her glasses. He made a questioning noise, and she continued, “Last week you were talking about how much you didn’t want to get traded. How you feel like winning the Cy Young Award bought you at least a year or two. But Tim doesn’t have one, right?”

Zito saw where she was going, and tried to cut her off before she could get there. “I’m not gonna avoid making friends with guys because they might get traded.”

“God, I’d hope not.” She gave him a gently admonishing look, Zito’s dad’s you’re-smarter-than-that look. “But I know the kind of . . . focus you give some of your friends.”

“Dude, you can call me obsessive, I don’t mind.”

She smiled. “You’re not obsessive. You are fairly dependent on the people around you for your self-image, though. Particularly your teammates, right?”

Zito let his head hang slightly, studying the twisting Oriental pattern in the rug. “Yeah.”

“So the possibility that you could lose one of them without warning, to something beyond your control, something you couldn’t fix-”

“They don’t have to get traded for me to lose them,” Zito said sharply, and then bit his tongue, seeing his therapist’s eyebrows tick up incrementally. One of these days he was going to have to learn to think before he spoke.

“You want to get into what you mean by that?” she asked mildly, setting her pad and pen down and sitting back, pulling off her glasses and giving him an even, genuine look.

“Um. Not really.”

She smiled a little bit, kinda tired and like they were in a coffeeshop instead of her untidy office. “Well, now I’m really interested.”

Zito shrugged, his mind whirring and clicking, panicked for a long second before his eyes fell on the clock, saw with amazing relief that they were two minutes over.

“But we’re out of time,” he said, pointing at the clock. She glanced at it and then shot her eyes right back to him, her face getting tight with a parental disappointment. Zito felt a dirty wash of shame pulse through him, having trouble holding her gaze.

“That’s great,” she said, her tone dangerously neutral, her eyes boring into him. “That’s a great strategy you’re employing right now, Barry.”

Zito flushed deeply and sank into his chair as if he could willfully squeeze himself into nothing. He felt his defenses fall, the misery and despair resurfacing on his face, and his therapist’s expression was cast with sudden honest concern, a break in her own mask.

“I’m fine,” he told her quickly, swallowing hard. “I. I’m not doing whatever you think I’m doing. There’s just. There’s some stuff I’m not gonna talk to you about.”

He got to his feet and she stayed in her seat, looking up at him with worry and exasperation, shaking her head. “That’s what we in the business call a red flag, my friend.”

Zito ignored that, scrambling at his inside coat pocket for Beane’s letter. “Could you just sign this please?”

She took it and put her glasses back on to scan over it quickly. Her mouth thinned and Zito’s stomach dived—she wasn’t going to sign it. She thought he was crazy too, and this was her _job_.

But after a moment she sighed and reached for a pen. Zito exhaled carefully so that she wouldn’t hear.

Before she handed it back, she stood and gave him another piercing look. “I signed because the last thing you need right now is not to be allowed to play baseball.” Zito nodded fervently, opening his mouth to agree but his therapist held up a finger, told him, “But you’re having more trouble than I think you realize.”

Zito almost had to laugh. “Oh, I realize.”

“Then do something about it. I’m going to email you some names of therapists in Phoenix and San Francisco. Okay?” Zito nodded, crossing his fingers behind his back, and she poked him in the arm. “ _Okay_?”

“Okay, yes. Should I swear on something?” His fingers were crossed the whole time, his face feeling bright red, sure there was a tremor in his voice, sure she would see, but he must have played it off because she laughed and gave him his letter, let him go.

Once he was out of the building, poleaxed by the sunlight, Zito thought about the dependency thing and decided that it was all bad press, it wasn’t really so damaging. He’d fixated on his teammates since he was thirteen and realized he wanted to make out with a lot of them. Everything he’d been through, the maladies and depressions and addictions, he’d survived on the back of one teammate or another. At the very least, it had to be considered a successful strategy; Zito had never really expected to live to see twenty-five, and there it was less than three months away.

The mistake you made, he told himself, his eyes thinned against the onslaught of neon signs and chrome and pinwheeling rims, was forgetting that ballplayers are inherently transient. Zito had had literally thousands of teammates by this point in his life, and every single one of them had left him eventually, and he really should have learned.

*

So he was sane on paper at least when he went back to Phoenix, but Zito was learning more about shades of gray every day, existing somewhere on the spectrum closer to committable than merely disturbed. He had good days and bad.

He’d latched back onto Hudson, sticking close and futilely trying to use Hudson as a human shield because Mulder still couldn’t look at Zito without his expression becoming faintly homicidal. Just like rookie year, Hudson rolled his shoulders back and made room for Zito in his daily routine without comment, though he was more reserved, more grown-up; he never roughhoused with Zito anymore, never tackled him or scrubbed both hands through Zito’s hair or sat with his leg pressed casually against Zito’s side on the dugout steps.

It was still an enormous relief to Zito, Hudson like a storm anchor, but Mulder’s frank loathing of him was beginning to grate.

Mulder was treating him like less than scum. He froze Zito out completely unless they were in a group, and then Mulder came up with some derisive comment to make about everything Zito said, tearing him down and carefully luring the others into cracking on Zito as well. Zito ended up fleeing a lot of conversations, his face brick-red and his hands in fists tight enough to draw blood on his palms.

And he wasn’t clicking into his pitching rhythm like he always did within a few hours of his first bullpen session of the spring. He sputtered, faltered, false-starting and watching the ball abandon the path he’d intended for it, soaring high and in, exploding into the dirt in front of the plate like a UFO crashlanding in a desert. They’d only been down here a week so far, and Zito knew it wouldn’t last, just some kind of weird off-season hangover.

But pitching this badly still bothered him, kept him up nights while he fought the shakes, his alcohol intake down by a third and he felt the loss the most at two in the morning. Lying awake and aching, he was able to convince himself that what was wrong with him was Mulder, Mulder sneering and loathing and cursing Zito in thought every time he set eyes on him.

Bad hoodoo, Zito thought, weighing down his shoulders and his curveball, fucking with his delicate position in the universe.

So one night, before a rare off-day, Zito let himself drink like his body had been crying out for ever since he’d gotten down here. Stellas in stemmed glasses like the commercials, milky silver shots that Hudson kept pressing on him, and Zito played darts with devastating accuracy, feeling like an assassin.

Mulder was with them, but not really—he’d spent most of his time sitting at the bar talking on his phone. It needled at Zito, irritated him beyond reason because the guy on his cell at the bar was invariably a tool, and Mulder would eventually come back over and be seen with them.

It was just one more thing on top of Zito’s growing conviction that Mulder’s bad vibes were screwing with his game, and he was drunk enough to actually do something about it tonight.

Handily pegging a nineteen for points while Hudson swore, Zito kept one eye on Mulder’s leather-jacketed shoulders, the bend of his head casting the barlight in a halo atop his hair. When Mulder finally ended his call and finished his drink, stood craning his neck around before spotting the bathroom, Zito handed his two remaining darts to Hudson.

“Gonna hurl,” he said succinctly, saw Hudson’s face warp with disgust before he nodded and waved Zito away quickly, and he followed Mulder into the back hallway.

“Hey,” Zito said before Mulder could push open the door to the men’s. Mulder looked back over his shoulder, buzzed not drunk and immediately that stony look fell across his features again. Zito steeled himself. “You gotta stop hating me so much because it’s fucking up my karma and I can’t pitch like this.”

Zito waited, braced even though he didn’t think Mulder would really punch him—shove him, sure, slam him into the wall, but those bruises didn’t show on the face; photo day was on Thursday. Mulder shook his head a couple times, his mouth opening and closing like what Zito had just said was so moronic he couldn’t even decide where to begin.

“It’s bad for the team, Mark,” Zito said when the silence got oppressive. Mulder laughed harshly in disbelief, new outrage pouring over the old.

“You cannot be serious,” Mulder said. “ _You_ cannot be talking about the good of the fucking team.”

“What?” Zito was getting angry himself, and that was good, felt healthy and right. “I’ve hurt the team, that’s what you’re saying. I’m only the best pitcher in the fucking _league_ , but somehow I’ve hurt the team?”

“You disabled our third baseman, you fucked him up so bad.”

“No, that was you. _You_. Nobody had any problems with anything until you came home early.”

Mulder shook his head violently, his ears maroon-colored and his teeth gnashing, too many things to say, too many ways to tear him down. Zito was pretty glad they were in public.

“It’s _you_ ,” Mulder hissed, stepping close and Zito backed up involuntarily, bumping into the fliered and leafleted wall, caught on Mulder’s furious blue gaze. “You go from me to Huddy to Eric, and god knows how many in between, and you _always_ -” and he cut himself off, took a sudden ragged breath before continuing, “It’s like a game for you, and Eric, you can’t fuck with him like that because it’ll fucking kill him. I wasn’t gonna let you do it.”

Zito was frozen with shock for a moment, and then the impact slammed through him like a full-body blow, a cheap slide after the ball was dead, and he slumped back into the wall of paper with his face contorted by disbelief.

“I wasn’t—I never did that, Mark, what are you talking about? You didn’t want me and Tim didn’t want me and you didn’t want Chavvy, so how is any of this my fault?”

Mulder’s eyes flashed. “All I know is he was happier before he met you, and so was I.”

“Jesus,” Zito said faintly, staring at him and trying to concentrate on the pins digging into his back. “You say the worst things to me sometimes.”

And for just a second, maybe even less than that, Mulder shifted back onto his heels slightly, his expression regretful, stymied for just that one instant before it hardened again.

“You know that was the truth,” Mulder said softly, and Zito closed his eyes.

Yes, fine, right now Chavez might wish that he’d never met Zito, but it wasn’t fair, you couldn’t just discount the two years when Zito was the only person Chavez always wanted to see. Zito had no idea how long this interval of visceral heartbreak would go on, what the final tally would be.

“Truth,” Zito echoed, letting a knife-edge of meanness slice through him. “Like how you’re mostly upset because you never had the balls fuck him yourself?”

He slit his eyes open and saw Mulder’s face reddening, fists tight enough to push out the veins on his forearms. Zito smirked, his blood running hot, feeling more unstable than usual.

“I know you wanted to,” he continued. “And you shoulda, he’s so fucking good, man-”

Mulder lurched as if to lunge at Zito, and Zito ducked half out of the way, a bolt of solid fear low in his stomach, dragging a few neon-pink flyers down with him. Mulder caught himself before his fist made contact with Zito, and he stopped, visibly forcing control, before shoving Zito hard, knocking him down onto the dirty floor.

Zito lay on his shoulder, a knot rising where the side of his head had banged into the floor, staring at the raked white columns splitting the black on Mulder’s Adidas sneakers. The abrupt change of position was dizzying, and Zito experienced the sudden sensation of being buried.

“You don’t even deserve to be on the same team as him,” Mulder spat at him from above, and Zito watched him walk away, then closed his eyes again.

He was going to lie here for just a little while longer. In a minute, somehow, he was going to get to his feet again.

*

Chavez showed up with the rest of the fielders on the last day of February, sporting a small crucifix on a gold thread around his neck and brandishing photographs of himself with his arms around a pretty blonde girl who couldn’t have looked happier.

Everything Zito heard was secondhand, hearsay because he and Chavez were still pretending the other didn’t exist. Byrnes spent ten minutes describing the girl’s body as if he’d actually met her, while Zito contemplated splintering a pencil to insert underneath his fingernails so he wouldn’t have to picture Chavez with her, with a _woman_.

Zito had never really been able to argue with straight. It was like Kryptonite.

Scott Hatteberg said that Chavez had met her (Alex, and surely it didn’t mean anything that it was a boy’s name too) at his church group, and Zito worried about that, too, hating the idea that Chavez had been forgiven, saved, while Zito was still being corrupted.

He had this scene in his mind all the time, the obvious future. Beane was already working on Chavez’s extension offer, forsaking Miguel Tejada in the name of some kid in the system, this Bobby Crosby character. Oakland had enough money for one long-term deal a decade, and Chavez was going to ring in the millennium for them.

So Chavez would get to stay here for life, or at least the part that mattered, and soon enough he’d have a magazine-perfect wife, adorable half-Mexican kids and a couple of dogs with gold and green bandanas around their necks. Chavez would be the face of the team, the beating heart, etched into the three hole and the fifth position, and the only trial he would have to suffer would be watching the rest of them leave one by one.

Zito could see all this so clearly, down to the smallest details: the whirlwind-type sprinklers in their yard, the color of the dog bowls, the bobbleheads nodding in a row on the mantle. There would be Polaroids under chipped magnets on the refrigerator, Chavez cradling a newborn in his glove with the biggest, stupidest grin on his face.

It didn’t feel hypothetical or theoretical, not on the ragged amount of sleep Zito was getting. Chavez’s future suddenly seemed inevitable, intractable, and Zito wasn’t even upset so much as aghast at how badly he’d allowed himself to be misled.

Really, Zito had been right at the start, when he’d seen Chavez as nothing more than a second choice, his consolation prize. It was supposed to be superficial and brief and almost entirely physical, and Zito spent hours trying to pinpoint the moment when his control had begun to slip, as if knowing when he’d started to fall would somehow help him survive the impact.

But there wasn’t any one moment, or if there was, Zito had been too drunk to recognize it. It had been a random mindless fuck that just snowballed until the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. It had come about so naturally.

Zito lay awake at night reliving the three days they’d spent in his Hollywood apartment last winter, the six days in Chavez’s place in Oakland, thinking that that was the happiest he’d ever been that wasn’t on a baseball field, but by four in the morning, it had lost the qualifier and it was just the happiest he’d ever been.

*

Chavez broke first.

It was shortly after the season started, after Zito’s first start, and he was down in the trainer’s room with a pack of ice on his shoulder, a cramped grimace on his face as he waited for the stinging burn to numb. He was feeling light-headed, shaky as the adrenaline drained off, his head tipped back on the wall as he tried to identify the strange flattening drag that had developed on his pitches in the late innings, nothing he could remember afflicting him previously.

The sound of the door shutting pulled his attention back, blinking groggily as the spectre at the door tripled and then fused, solidified into Eric Chavez.

Half-numb and fighting the blur of exhaustion over his mind, Zito realized that he hadn’t looked at Chavez face-to-face this close since that black night seven months ago. They hadn’t been alone in a room in that long, either.

Chavez had always looked out of place, uncomfortable and slightly sad amidst the raucousness of his teammates, the eternal frat party, and Zito used to hotly anticipate the moment he got Chavez alone, the fall of his shields and the drop of his shoulders, the suddenly pliant bend of his body, but never again.

Zito had to keep reminding himself, _never again_.

Now Chavez was black-eyed and riveted, a hunted thing against the door, snatching glances at Zito like stolen drinks of water. Zito wanted to tell him, go ahead and stare, it’s the least you could do, but his mouth wasn’t working.

After a long crystalline moment, Chavez said sounding kinda panicked, “Say something. Say anything, will you, and quit pretending it didn’t happen. You can still see me, I know you can, so please. Please, I don’t even care anymore, I just need you to say something to me, okay?”

Zito was quietly stunned, immediately on his guard, because Chavez was pretty much a mess and that had never happened before. Chavez’s overriding priority had always been maintaining his game face, never letting it show, and Zito didn’t know how to deal with him like this.

He scrounged around, desperate and futile because everything was loaded, nothing was what it seemed anymore. He just wanted to get that look off Chavez’s face, he couldn’t stand seeing it.

Zito came up with some dumb story about a homeless man’s sign, watching Chavez carefully and slightly frightened by how single-mindedly Chavez was staring at him as he spoke, his eyes huge and greedy like seven months without really seeing Zito had caused a decimating full-body withdrawal.

It wrecked Zito almost immediately, an instinctive bolt of heat and then a crashing wave of defeat as he remembered: _never again_.

He didn’t mean to say it out loud, but heard anyway, “I kinda hate you, you know.”

Chavez nodded, his expression and posture miserable except for those crazy midnight thoughts careening in his eyes, and said, “So do I.”

The tip of Chavez’s tongue darted out to wet his lips, and Zito swallowed, saw Chavez’s gaze drop to his throat and then hold there, a distant haze clouding the air between them. Zito thought about Chavez coming over here, setting his hand on the bare skin of Zito’s stomach, leaning in to press his mouth against Zito’s throat, a grin that felt like a bite and Chavez whispering how quick Zito had to be, they’ll be back any second babe so _hurry_.

And again, again: _never again_.

Zito jerked his head off the wall and tried to clear his mind, distracted anew by that blank foggy look on Chavez’s face and they couldn’t live like this, lost in the past. Zito had tried that before and it had nearly killed him.

They couldn’t _live_ like this. It’d been seven months and Zito still wanted Chavez so bad it incapacitated him, left him completely overrun.

“Listen,” Zito heard himself say in a strange croaky voice. “Listen to me, man, are you listening?”

Chavez tugged his head to the side in half a nod, made a rough sound of assent. Nothing had ever been as dark as his eyes, nothing in the whole world.

Zito swallowed hard, fisting his hands. “You have to forget about me. Let it go. Nothing’s gonna get better until we accept that it wasn’t real. You gotta promise that you’ll forget.”

I never loved you and you never loved me, Zito continued helplessly, without voice, watching the fall and contort of Chavez’s features. Mulder will never talk and no one else knew so if we agree it never happened then it never did, and it won’t hurt anymore.

It was their only hope, a revisionist history to match the outside world’s, but Chavez was more practical than Zito and he’d never appreciated well-intentioned mistruths. Zito could operate easily under a dozen contradictions, a born liar because he was a born pitcher, but Chavez had an infielder’s black-and-white mind, the masterfully straightforward approach of a line drive hitter.

So Zito probably shouldn’t have been surprised when Chavez gave him a look almost like betrayal and left the room without saying a word. It certainly shouldn’t have felt like having Chavez physically torn away from him again, a fresh gouge along the valley of Zito’s heart, but it did because Chavez had denied him to Mulder, but he wouldn’t deny Zito to his face, and Zito didn’t know what the fuck he was supposed to do with that.

*

On and on, and nothing changed. The team continued to win, which was the only positive. Zito was still pitching as poorly as he ever had, utterly distraught because his tendency towards exaggeration had caught up with him and it was finally literal. He had never been lit up like this, never in his life, and the touch was gone from his fingertips, the faith from his heart.

He was cagey still, paranoid and locked in his own head enough to keep himself in games most of the time, but it came to nothing because the hitters were saving all their runs for Mulder’s starts while Hudson and Zito died of thirst under the wide-open stadium skies.

And being smart enough to outthink meathead first basemen in the moment didn’t help him in the dugout and the off-hours, the vast balance of his life, when being smart only meant he could identify and endlessly dissect every single thing he’d done wrong. It was building, weighing on him more by the inning, the pitch, the half-flicker of Ramon’s fingers before he changed the sign, remembering that Zito didn’t have the curve tonight.

He and Hudson spent a lot of time commiserating about lousy luck and the unfortunate alignment of the planets. Usually they had drinks, even though Zito was trying to cut down because he’d always said, not if it affected his game. He was pretty sure drinking had nothing to do with his skid, always having been an extremely highly functioning alcoholic, but it was worth a shot.

Hudson was having a porch built onto the back of his house, stuck out into the wild wreck of the greenery on the steep hill. When they got back from a game, the work crew was long gone, the half-done porch like a shipwrecked prow dropped by storm into a jungle.

Hudson said the bit that was finished was plenty sturdy, so they sat out in patio chairs with the mini-cooler between them, talking shit about Mark Mulder, long one of Zito’s favorite activities.

“Did you see him today, with the gum?” Zito asked, referring to Mulder’s addiction to the super-hydrating neon-colored gum sold in athletic stores, each piece of which apparently held its flavor for about fifteen minutes before needing to be exchanged.

Hudson grinned, shook his head. “I only paid attention in the clubhouse, but I’m gonna guess sixteen pieces.”

“Twenty-two! It was remarkable, like he was in a trance.”

“I’ve been watchin’, I don’t think anybody else actually takes that gum. I think it’s just there for him.”

“It’s probably in his contract. He probably had it like stipulated and shit because he’s so fucking cheap.”

Laughing, Hudson said, “Are you kidding? _Only_ a multimillion-dollar business could afford to subsidize the man’s habit.”

Zito grinned, rocking a little bit because he was feeling better right now, all of Hudson’s attention on him. “Yeah, he’s lame.”

“Man, you know,” Hudson said thoughtfully, his eyes slowly glossing over. “I always mean to ask and I always forget, but what is your feud with him, anyway? Like, day one, there was already this crazy tension.”

Zito reached back and grabbed the leg of the patio chair, held his arm uncomfortably stiff and straight, thinking, hold on and keep your head and get out of it.

“I knew him before, you know,” Zito said, and he sounded just right, casual and dismissive and drunk enough to seem honest. “In the minors and even before because of the Cape League. I told you how we were in the Cape League together.”

Hudson bobbed his head. “Y’all go way back. This is like Hatfield-McCoy shit.”

Zito made a smile. “Yeah. There wasn’t anything in particular. He. He used to sneer at me and my friends on the Cape, sometimes. ‘Cause, you know, we smoked a little herb, got drunk on Tuesdays once in a while. Nineteen years old, right? It wasn’t like we were fucked up all the time.” Half-truth, fair enough to his friends but Zito at least had been pretty fucked up pretty often. “Mark never said anything or did anything, but you could tell he was, like, looking down at us. And I, I don’t even know if he remembered that it was me, like, after he met me. But I already thought he was a jerk, and treated him like a jerk and, ta-da, he reacted like a jerk. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I know, but there you go. He’s never really done much to counter the impression.”

Hudson took a long speculative drink, tapping his shoe for the hollow wooden sound. He shrugged. “He’s not a bad guy at all.”

Zito sighed. “I know.”

“Which makes it weird that he hates you as much as he does.”

A hard flinch made Zito click his bottle against the arm of the chair, but Hudson was looking up at the stars and didn’t notice. Zito felt his face heating in the dark, berating himself because he’d known Mulder hated him, that wasn’t news.

“What can I say?” he said, aiming for flippant and missing quite badly. “I inspire fierce emotions. It’s for the good in most people, but if he wants to be warped-”

“Kid, that’s the thing. He’s totally not warped about anything except you. He’s so laidback and chill and you can rip on him for weeks before you get a rise and he always lets us off poker debts and, like, he’s the best, really. And then he gets around you and it’s like, damn. Scary.”

Zito shook his head, horrified at Hudson’s description because he’d known a guy like that once—he’d known _Mulder_ once. He could have had a best friend this whole time, but he’d fucked it up by making a move before they even got to first names, and now he was the one person Mulder hated, and six years from now, how would Eric Chavez feel about him?

“I don’t know what it is, Tim,” he said, flat-sounding and dull. “I’ve tried to make him like me. I tried for a long time.”

Hudson exhaled, made a philosophical hum. “Well. That’s baseball, I guess.”

Zito turned his eyes upwards too, his prior good mood unleavened into a nostalgic sort of melancholy. A blinking red light sped across lengths of space, aimed at the moon, and Zito was thinking that it was some kind of miracle that Hudson, at least, had remained loyal to him. He’d had all the reason in the world to cut Zito off just like Mulder and Chavez had, sorely done by Zito when Zito was in an externally destructive phase, but he never had. Hudson was probably just a much better person than everyone else involved, and Zito had no real context for that kind of thing anymore.

The red light passed swift as a hand in front of the moon, and when Zito asked, “It’s a plane?” Hudson answered, “It’s a bird,” and then they said as one, in perfect time: “Superman.”

*

Chavez had been engaged to be married for a week before Zito heard about it. He was sitting on the couch with his headphones on and eyes closed, but there was no music playing, the whole posture only a front for eavesdropping; this was one of the ways Zito had learned to occupy himself since he’d started phasing out substance abuse.

Behind him and over to the right, Zito caught the edge of Chavez’s voice, identifiable in a breath, and heard him approach, talking quietly with someone else.

“She says Hawaii, but I don’t know, it’s a hassle. Making everybody fly over. And it rains in Hawaii a lot, I looked it up.”

“So you get a tent instead of doing it on the beach like a fucking hippie.” It was Mark Ellis, whose locker was directly behind Zito on the couch and at which they’d evidently paused. “And people are generally pretty happy to get an excuse to go to Hawaii.”

“Those awful shirts,” Chavez bemoaned, fading as they moved on.

I’ve seen photos of you, Zito told Chavez in his head, heard Chavez shout in mock outrage, I was ten! and he almost smiled before he processed the rest of the exchange and realized what was going on.

He stiffened involuntarily, his whole body braced as if unsure from which direction the blow would come. Chavez was getting married. Chavez was going to bind himself to another person and swear fealty until death, and Zito wasn’t going to be there.

Zito had spent a full year trying to train his mind away from Eric Chavez, not letting himself dwell or stare or dream or wish, and now this had happened like a punishment for not paying attention. God was reminding him for the millionth time, you are not in control so don’t bother.

No one else seemed to find it unexpected that Chavez might want to get married, though Zito bit his tongue bloody, waiting in growing frustration for someone to bring up the fact that Chavez had just met this girl, and wasn’t he rushing just a fucking tad?

But no one did. Chavez had met the girl seven months ago; there were guys on the team who’d never managed half of that. It would be his second marriage and he never talked about his first (again, literal—all anybody knew was what had been in the papers), which suggested that he now took the entire enterprise with a fair grain of salt. They trusted that Chavez knew what he was doing, and secretly, Zito thought that they were probably right.

Chavez wouldn’t fuck around with marriage, wouldn’t go through with it for the sake of distraction or repentance or normalcy, the unlocked doors and parental approval and open daylight contact that he’d sacrificed to fuck around with Zito in bathroom stalls for two years. Chavez wasn’t doing this for the wrong reasons; there was no way that Zito had damaged him that badly.

And so there could be no question about it. One year after Mulder had stumbled through the veil of their illicit double life, two things had become clear. The first was that Zito had been fathoms deeper in love with Chavez than he’d ever suspected, and the second was that although at some point in the past it might have been arguable that Chavez felt the same, it was now patently untrue.

*

Zito’s pitching came back to him towards the end of the season, after Mulder got hurt and a Canadian kid named Harden took over his spot in the rotation. Harden was twenty-one years old and looked five years younger, didn’t even have to shave really, and Zito got a sense of what the veterans must have felt when he himself came up mid-year: no way is this fucking _child_ gonna show me up.

That was part of his resurgence, but mostly it was that he wasn’t obsessing about his games anymore. The walls in his mind had crumbled under the pressure and he’d had to allow his consciousness free rein again, or else go completely off the edge. He couldn’t help thinking about Chavez now, feeling obscurely that once Chavez was wed, he would become somehow more off-limits than usual.

Zito found himself skulking around more and more, sneaking glances at Chavez from over the top of a magazine, under his cap brim, addicted to it because he’d starved himself for a year. There was something different about Chavez now, desolate shadows under his eyes and a solemn soldierly hardness to his jaw, but Zito knew he couldn’t trust his memory, flawed and idealized as it was.

When he closed his eyes, when he pictured Chavez, without fail the image that arose was Chavez amid wrecked white sheets, the calm happy Eric Chavez that had existed only in Zito’s bed. Everything else looked cheap beside that, impure and corrupt.

One night in the top of the fourth, as the gale force pennant-race winds howled around the bowl of the Coliseum, Chavez came up to the mound between batters, picking up the rosin and muttering to Zito:

“Stop it.”

Chavez wasn’t looking at him, his eyes on the dirt and a flush spread across his cheekbones. Zito couldn’t remember the last time Chavez had spoken to him directly.

“What?” he managed.

Chavez glanced at Zito reluctantly, like someone had grabbed hold of his chin and forced it up, hot rake of a glare across Zito’s face. “Quit looking over at me every two fucking minutes.”

“I’m not,” Zito denied automatically, though he probably had been. He usually was.

“You are. It’s really obvious. Knock it off.” Chavez chucked the rosin bag at Zito’s feet to puff a cloud of white dust, and stalked off the mound.

The home crowd rocked and murmured, unintelligible oceanic white noise until a single piercing voice speared out of the mix, calling Zito’s name like they were two ships leagues apart. Zito was abruptly awoken into the moment, registering that the conversation, like so much of their lives, had taken place in front of forty thousand people and also on television.

He stepped off the mound and paced around the back of it, braving one quick glance over at third, where Chavez was waiting to bare his teeth and shout silently, PITCH. Zito jerked his eyes away, his face blistered with embarrassment, and he swiped off his cap, pushed a hand through his hair and heard Miguel Tejada chant softly behind him, “ _Vamos, vamos_ ,” so he got back on the rubber and leaned in.

Zito watched tape of the game afterwards, newly humiliated but not really surprised as he saw himself glance over at third base dozens of times in the first two innings alone, his eyes locking on Chavez’s form for a split second, the quickest fix, and Chavez was right, it was incredibly obvious. Everyone must have seen that.

He tried to be better about it, after that. He started wearing a rubber band around his wrist that he would snap when he caught himself staring, pulling especially hard when he did it on camera or if Chavez noticed. A thin red welt developed like a suicide attempt prosecuted in glacically slow motion.

They had to fight for the Angels for the division all the way down the line, and Zito was already exhausted beyond comprehension when the playoffs started, the muscles in his arm disturbingly loose and stringy, his head pounding all the time. The team said to each other like a motto, a warcry, hoorah and eleven games. Eleven more games they needed to win before they were done.

That was just a week and a half worth of roadtrip in July, three cities in one smeary alloyed memory, but in October it would take a whole month and each win would be multitudes harder than the last. Beane could talk all he wanted about how the playoffs were a dice roll, Russian roulette with bullets in three chambers, but it didn’t really help. Even bad luck came from somewhere and chose them for a reason, punishment or trial or karma or fucked-up cosmic joke.

Zito’s outlook had changed this season, perhaps understandly considering how abysmally he’d performed, but he was starting to anticipate the breakdown of each game, split-second mental errors and hung curves that Zito would never get back. Obviously they weren’t going to go the distance this year because this year God really didn’t like Zito.

So he knew they were going to get knocked out early again, even after they went up two games on the Red Sox and circled the stadium for twenty minutes slapping hands and flinging baseballs into the stands, their own names raining down on them and everyone cheering, all fifty thousand still on their feet, still there.

They went to Boston and there was freakish electricity in the air that put Zito in the mind of Ben Franklin even though he was pretty sure the dude was from Philadelphia. The Fenway crowds were seething, railing out of their minds because they were so close once again, and the loudest they got every night was when the Yankee score changed on the out-of-town scoreboard.

Zito had learned his history pretty well. The Yankees and Red Sox needed to play each other for the pennant every few years to keep the world on its axis, and nobody ever remembered the teams they went through to have the privilege.

It played out just like that. They came home so that the final loss could be especially painful, and everybody’s face had a dead look except for Tejada, who would never again wear the green and gold, weeping openly on the steps of the dugout, and Ellis crying more subtly with his hands screwed in Mulder’s jersey, using him as a human shield.

Zito felt like a shell, scraped out to a millimeter of skin that was as permeable as tissue paper. He followed white jerseys down the dark tunnel, insensible and counting down the tasks before he could get out of this terrible place.

He was dressed and packed up and almost done, almost gone, every cell yearning for the cleansing slam of the wind and the oblivion of the highway, when he turned and bumped into Eric Chavez.

Chavez swayed backwards, unbalanced by the bag slung over his shoulder that clacked with bats and balls. He looked genuinely shocked to see Zito, as if Zito had bodily materialized in his path, and he reached out, pressing his fingers to Zito’s chest for less time than a heartbeat, just an affirmation before Chavez stepped back, his face drawing closed.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

Zito shook his head, a torrent of possible responses crushing into his mind, cramming his throat. “It’s okay. Not the worst thing that happened today.”

Nothing, not even a flicker of a smile. If anything, Chavez’s eyebrows pulled down further, his battered eyes narrowed and directed just past Zito’s ear. His voice shook as he said quietly, “I’ll see you next year, man.”

Chavez tried to brush past but Zito turned with him, hard rush of blood in his ears, saying fast, “I hope it works out with her.”

Chavez froze, half a step past Zito and his head half-turned so that Zito could see the color rise on his cheek, the press of the muscle in his jaw as he clenched his teeth. Chavez was searching for Zito’s angle, scanning for a sneer or a scoff, but Zito was being sincere; he was almost certain he meant it this time.

Chavez glanced back at Zito, a mix of fear and suspicion on his face. “Thank you,” he said carefully.

Zito shrugged, feeling godawful, a wrenched clenching fist in his stomach. “I generally wish you well. Or, really, I no longer wish you any specific harm.”

And there, maybe a quarter of a smile, a tooth and a half, just for a second or so but it rallied Zito slightly, like the sharp gold rind of the sun through nightening clouds. Chavez tipped his head to the side in acknowledgement, saying softly:

“Progress.”

“Yeah.” Zito stuffed his A’s cap in his bag and retrieved the non-descript red one that he wore on his own time. He looked back up and met Chavez’s eyes, suffered the familiar spear of pain and said, “Maybe someday we’ll even play for the pennant.”

Chavez nodded, though he looked kinda destroyed, and they left it at that. Zito let Chavez get ahead of him so they wouldn’t have to meet again in the parking lot. He walked out into the off-season alone, feeling that sense of immediate displacement he associated with pushing through the metal turnstiles into Mexico, a switch flipped in the back of his mind: no longer on native soil.

*

On the day that Chavez was getting married in Hawaii, Zito started drinking at ten in the morning so that he would pass out long before succumbing to the urge to call. It was the kind of thing that let him know he was still pretty screwed up mentally, because he saw absolutely no benefit in calling, and could actually foresee six or seven hundred ways that it might go fatally wrong, and yet it was still the only thing he wanted to do.

You’re supposed to be a rational animal, he admonished himself around one in the afternoon, lying on the couch and fighting the spins. And even if you’re not, you’re still alive and your fundamental priority is staying that way, so what the fuck.

By three, he was having the debate out loud. By five, he was enacting both sides of the potential call to Chavez, dozens of versions that ran one into the other, and even when Zito was the only one participating in the conversation, it still rarely went well for him. By seven, mission accomplished, he was sprawled insensate on the alley of carpet between the coffee table and the couch, magazines spilling over his legs.

Sadly, the desire to speak to Chavez didn’t go away when Zito regained consciousness in the early hours of the morning, the blackest stretch before dawn. It actually seemed to get worse, or maybe that was Zito drinking in reflex, heightening his paranoiac responses and the creativity of his rationalizations.

It wasn’t that strange, he tried to convince himself. Chavez had been revealed as a critical chapter of Zito’s life, his first real anything, and now he was married to someone else, and this had to be a normal reaction.

Four days after Chavez got married, two days after the team grapevine had reported him safely delivered back to San Diego, Zito was out at a club, matching kamikazes against some guy’s white russians in a World War II rematch of the Red and Imperial Armies. The guy was better than good, but too much Zito’s type, handsome americanized Latino boy, Chavez’s clean-shaven half-brother, and he reached a level of drunk where the resemblance made him panic, suffocating for some sign of his own Eric.

So his pledge to stay aloof and removed crumbled out on the sidewalk, away from the streetlights and the shiny snaking line of club kids and twinks cadging brown-papered bottles and laughing into each other’s shoulders. Zito ducked just around the corner of an alley, bracing himself on the bricks and calling Chavez, counting the rings.

Chavez answered late, hissing and ticked off before a long pause as he got somewhere secure. He was still ticked off, but at a regular volume as he asked Zito what he wanted.

Zito hadn’t really gone so far as to think of what he wanted to say to Chavez once he finally got him on the phone, and he scrambled for a minute, spinning bullshit to keep the conversation going, hyperaware of Chavez’s terse replies and impatient breaths. Suddenly the phone itself was a terrible barrier—now that Zito had heard his voice, he only wanted to see Chavez in person, just once, just to see what he looked like with a ring.

Chavez was fed up with him, and almost hung up before Zito said hurriedly, off the top of his head, “I could come down.”

There was a moment of silence and Zito rolled his forehead on the brick, a feel like petrified reptile skin, praying that Chavez wouldn’t hang up on him, wouldn’t leave him like this again.

“You could, huh,” Chavez said in a whisper, and Zito’s breath caught in his chest, his lungs contracting sharply because it was almost like Chavez was going to say okay.

Zito closed his eyes, summoning the desert highway that would take him to San Diego, and an abrupt uneven laugh broke from him. “Of course, Chavvy, it’s only an hour.”

“If you speed.”

“I’ll speed.”

Zito dug his forehead into the wall, his eyes tighter than knots and his whole body thrumming, begging, _please chavvy please let me come_.

This was going to be the turning point, the proof that what they had was epic, insurmountable. This was going to be the start of the second part, the part where Chavez was married but still in love with Zito and still sneaking around with him, yanking him into doorways for hard kisses while on bar tours with the guys, living together in a looping chain of anonymous hotel rooms across the country, sharing toothpaste and sheets and for all intents and purposes honest-to-god partners, but only when the door was double-bolted.

But then Chavez was saying in a faint, dulled voice, “Stay there, man. Don’t come down here,” and that was the end of that.

Zito’s eyes were burning and he worked on his breathing for a minute, getting himself under control. His mind flew wildly away from the dream of a second chance, casting about in a fury for something else, and all he could scrounge was, “What about next year?”

“What about it?”

Zito didn’t really know what to say; he’d hoped Chavez would know. He wanted to ask if it was going to stop feeling like he was being stabbed when Chavez looked at him, but Chavez probably didn’t know the answer to that.

“You’re not gonna sign,” Zito said eventually, a little more accusatorily than he would have liked.

“Who told you that?”

“Billy did. He says you want too much.” Zito had drunk-dialed Beane in the middle of the afternoon a few days before, on the pretext of asking if a psychiatrist’s note was still required (it’d been downgraded to “strongly recommended”), with the true purpose of wheedling information about the team’s pending extension offer to Chavez.

“Billy oughta know what it’s like,” Chavez replied, sounding tired.

“But Chavvy,” Zito said quickly, trying to impress that this was important, the crux of the matter. “If you don’t sign, what’ll happen _next year_?”

Couldn’t Chavez see that he was meant for this team, meant for his runt army to grow up idolizing, meant to sprint across the vast foul territory with his eyes trained on the sky, his magic glove outstretched? Didn’t he understand that this was what was meant by _home_?

“Next year,” Chavez said, each word shaped and told like a story, “next year you’ll play baseball, and I’ll play baseball, and we’ll see each other sometimes. Just like every year.”

Zito banged his head on the bricks, thinking that it wasn’t acceptable, he wouldn’t be reduced to a mere acquaintance. “I’ll forge your name on the contract if I have to. I’ll make Billy think it’s okay.”

“Don’t do anything,” Chavez told him, on edge. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

It was a fucking _joke_ , it had to be, and red lights burst behind Zito’s eyes as he hit his head a couple more times, the pain blurring outwards. He wished to be angrier than he was, wished it would blind him and wipe out his higher-level thinking. He wished he could make Chavez understand.

“It’d be the worst thing you ever did,” he said hoarsely. “Just so you know.”

There was a pause, and then Chavez answered, sounding ninety years old and feeling every hour of it, “Thanks, Barry. That’s just what I wanted to hear,” and as he fell silent, static crackled across the line, a final flagging spur of electrons connecting them through the ether.

*

Back in Phoenix, Chavez’s agent was quoted as saying if they didn’t have an extension done by the time the season started, it would be the last year Oakland would be graced with Chavez’s talents. Zito watched the clip on the television in the clubhouse, immediately looking around for Chavez and finding him only a few yards away, stopped in the middle of crossing the room, transfixed by the television.

Chavez’s expression was difficult to read, his eyebrows crumpled and his mouth working silently. He was visibly upset, but with a skein of bemusement, like he hadn’t known the situation was that bad. Zito wondered if Chavez had cleared the ultimatum, or if Dave Stewart was just in a no-hitter frame of mind and believed they couldn’t lose.

Chavez’s relations with his teammates grew strained and awkward for a little while, but that was mostly Chavez’s own fault. No one thought any less of him for not having signed yet, but Chavez seemed convinced that he was engaging in an unforgiveable treason, and acted so guilt-stricken and craven that it was easy to freeze him out until he recovered his better sense.

Dangerously close to the regular season deadline, the Athletics offered Chavez the biggest contract in franchise history. Zito came into the clubhouse that day just in time to see Chavez leaping off a stool onto Mulder’s back, staggering him forward, Chavez’s legs flying outwards and a bright wedge of a grin splitting his face.

Mulder bellowed as Chavez started razzing his head, and Bobby Crosby ran over to try to pull Chavez off, and after a few moments of struggle all three fell in a tangle to the floor. From under the rookie’s squirming form, Zito could hear Chavez still laughing.

So he’d signed. Sixty-six million dollars over six years, which would take him past Zito’s own free agency into a completely foreign team, composed of men they’d yet to meet. Six years from now, who could begin to predict what might happen in the interim? The earthquake might come and at last sever California from the mainland, six years from now they might be playing the Diamondbacks of Arizona Bay. Technology moved so fast these days, maybe planets would be colonized and the sun replaced as an energy source. It could be a whole different world, but it would be one in which Eric Chavez still played third for Oakland.

Zito began the season atrociously, and if last year his troubles had been mostly mental, by now he’d tweaked his motion too many times searching for a momentary cure, and his mechanics were utterly discombobulated. It was like a microscopic gear in his shoulder had slipped, the teeth millimeters from clicking truly into place, and no matter what he tried, he couldn’t find the fit.

The circumstance was made worse by Mulder, who’d apparently decided it was well past time for him to acquire a Cy Young Award of his own. Possessed by Lefty Grove, Mulder went the bulk of April and May without losing a game, golden-armed and getting stronger.

It drove Zito nuts, a callback to their respective minor league careers and Zito’s long-held bitterness at Mulder always being called up first. It’d been righteous anger when they were neophytes, when Zito was by all measurements the plainly better pitcher, but this was a new kind of agony. Mulder had leapt ahead of him, leaving spike marks in Zito’s back, and it was horrible thing to have to accept because Zito had reckoned himself superior to Mulder since the Cape League.

But in May Zito’s attention was diverted when a relief pitcher drilled Chavez with an inside fastball and broke his hand as it held the bat.

At the moment of impact, Chavez cried out in pain, obscuring the wooden crack. Zito jolted off the dugout bench and shouldered between the coaches to press himself to the rail, watching as Chavez bent almost double, his helmet tumbling off and his hand cradled against his stomach. Even across the acre of foul ground that separated them, Zito could hear Chavez spitting as the trainer jogged to him, “Broken, ow, fucking broken no doubt about it, _fuck_ , ow fuck.”

So Chavez was out for six to eight, and at least once a start, Zito would catch himself gazing over at Marco Scutaro playing third, mystified by Chavez’s absence. Everything hard-hit to the left side made his heart jump into his throat, no sort of confidence in the glove behind him.

Someday, Zito knew, whether by injury or trade or free agency, his regular third baseman would never again be Eric Chavez, but he hadn’t expected it to happen so soon, with the ink still wet on Chavez’s extension.

While on the DL, Chavez appeared to elicit enough of Mulder’s sympathy for them to emerge as real friends once more, abandoning the tense civil masks they’d worn the year before. They conspired against Zito from time to time, and Zito bore it stoically, content at least that Chavez had Mulder looking out for him again.

Mulder started the All-Star Game for the American League and a week later, temperatures broke a hundred in the East Bay for the first time that summer. Zito spent his free time coasting on an inflatable raft in a succession of teammates’ pools, sun-drunk and sun-stupid behind his shades, skin turning nut-brown and dark freckles appearing on the bridge of his nose.

It was a kind of waking coma brought on the weather, and Zito wasn’t the only one affected. Businessmen walked into telephone poles, bouncing off gently as balloons with perplexed looks on their faces. Cars idled at green lights until honked into action from behind. Even the rats that nested in the undergrowth at the edge of the Coliseum parking lot were disoriented, lost bundles of filthy gray fur wandering over the cracked chunks of volcanic asphalt.

Hudson, who was also on the DL and had taken on a necessarily philosophical bent, didn’t believe that the fugue was attributable to the heat, arguing instead that it was collective ennui, psychic pollution. It sounded like an all right theory to Zito, an alibi because if Hudson was right, then Zito couldn’t be held responsible for his despondency, nor any one of the pitches he’d tipped. He’d been sabotaged, they all had.

As the heat blew off, though, and the pennant race gained momentum, Zito began to find the stitches blindly with his fingertips again, began to anticipate the signs Miller would flash. The touch returned like sensation after novocaine, tingling and slow but there, undeniably there.

But just as Zito was starting to pitch like he knew how, Mulder fell off a cliff, and shortly thereafter dragged them all down with him.

It was astonishing. Mulder had won twelve games by the All-Star break, but he hit the wall hard enough to shake the whole organization. His sliders hung fat as grapefruit in the middle of the plate, his curves bouncing five feet in front, his fastballs whirring and soaring and bringing Miller swiftly to his feet to get some glove on it.

Mulder came back into the dugout stiff-legged, his face scrawled over with shock and disbelief and a huge unwieldy fury that frightened everyone. It was apparent that Mulder had no more idea what was happening to him than the rest of them did, and from the trainer’s room Zito could hear him snapping, “I told you, it doesn’t fucking hurt.”

If only it did. When something hurt, you could then go about fixing it. When nothing did, there wasn’t anywhere for them to even begin.

The unknowable contagion hit Mulder first, but soon spread, afflicting the rookie, who’d attached himself to Mulder’s hip all season and now couldn’t make contact with a wiffle ball. One by one, the hitters came down with it, bats quiet and cold, all their power stifled and irretrievable, and it didn’t matter how well Zito and Harden were pitching, or that Hudson believed with all his heart that he could be back for the playoffs, or that Mulder swore he’d fixed his head and everything would be aces from now on. .

On the first day of October they were tied with the Angels, and Mulder went all of two innings, giving up four runs on six hits, splintering and desperate and railing in the tunnel after he got yanked, his voice echoing and unintelligible. Joe Blanton went better than three innings in relief before giving up a grand slam that efficiently put the game out of reach, and then it was all up to Zito, the season passed on to his shoulders.

But Zito lost the next game, and they had to watch the Angels dog-pile on their field again, gray-shirted and estatic, a single terrible spot of joy in a stadium full of anguished faces and broken hearts.

He’d pitched well enough to win, but the offense had disintegrated and nothing, no prayer or shooting star could revive them. Zito had done as he was taught and left everything on the field, but that wasn’t smart. Baseball might be the foundation of the world, the one true faith, and this path might have been chosen for Zito by the birthmark on his wrist, the proof of God discernible in a perfect curveball, but all that meant was that without it, Zito didn’t even recognize himself.

The stranger in his uniform, his high socks and scribbled-on cap, drifted like a ghost into the clubhouse, catching bits and pieces of his teammates’ grief, all their backs turned to him, heads bowed. Zito had lived through so many scenes like this already, only twenty-six years old and already the accumulated weight of defeat was hunching his shoulders.

Standing just inside the entrance of the clubhouse, taking in the dismantled wreck of his team and trying to work up the strength to get across the room, Zito wondered if today would be the last time he was ever in the Oakland home team clubhouse. Someone was going to get traded this off-season, there was no question about that now, and Mulder’s collapse, Hudson’s injury, they were nothing compared to the radical mutilation of Zito’s talent, the suicidal drop of the past two seasons.

Someone walked into Zito from behind, forceful enough to trip him forward and stun him out of his masochistic reverie. He turned and Mulder was standing there red-faced with a lunatic sheen on his eyes.

“What are you doing? Move, you’re fucking in the way,” Mulder said without stepping back. He was close enough that Zito could see a stray eyelash trembling on his cheekbone.

Zito waited for the customary rush of frustrated anger that Mulder inspired, and it didn’t disappoint, more like a flood because everything was aggravated right now.

“Why don’t you look where you’re going,” Zito responded.

“It’s a _doorway_ , it’s a blind fucking turn.”

“That’s such bullshit, man, nobody else is having any trouble.”

Everyone else was clearing the area around them, actually, giving them a good ten foot radius and watching peripherally, only vaguely diverted from their dejection. Zito was up on the balls of his feet just slightly, overeager and made ruthless by sorrow.

Mulder jerked his head to the side, thinning his mouth. “Look, just leave it. Go get your shoulder iced.”

No way, no way, Zito thought, a chattery feeling in his chest. Nothing ends easy tonight.

Zito made a sneer, vicious curve of a smile underneath, and said, “Like I’m gonna follow your advice on anything related to pitching, Mark, you’re fucking dreaming.”

Mulder’s expression went rigid and blank, which should have terrified Zito but he’d just caught sight of Chavez past Mulder’s shoulder, Chavez watching them and fighting with the buttons of his jersey, his face shining, crying without seeming to realize it.

“Don’t you fucking start with me, Zito,” Mulder said in a dangerous low voice.

“Why not?” Zito tore his eyes away from Chavez and the ripped-off buttons falling like coins into a well. He locked back onto Mulder, an insolent curl to his lip that he could remember Mulder licking at constantly on the Cape, and Mulder’s eyes ducked down, widened. “Why shouldn’t I, when you fucking disappeared on us?”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Mulder said roughly, still staring at Zito’s mouth.

“What? Just tell me. Where the fuck did you go?” A dense heat grew in Zito’s stomach and behind his eyes, so angry and depressed and immeasurably freaked out by the gulf stretching between him and his team. He shoved at Mulder so that he wouldn’t take a swing at him. “We fucking needed you, where the fuck did you go?”

Mulder tipped backwards and caught his balance, lunged forward to grab Zito’s jersey, a snarl warping his face, and Zito didn’t fight him at all, gave himself up to Mulder gratefully. One last glance found Chavez bare-chested with his rent jersey twisted between his hands, stepping forward until Zito shook his head, gave Chavez a small smile to let him know it was okay.

Mulder slung Zito into the wall, inches from a plate glass window and hard enough to make his teeth crack together painfully, his bones vibrating like tuning forks. Mulder jammed the flat of his hand against Zito’s collarbone, not quite choking him but increasing the pressure, squeezing until Zito’s breath was a whistle, his heartbeat thundering.

“Same place you went two fucking years ago,” Mulder hissed, his face close to Zito’s and the pilot lights in his eyes snapping, flaring. “So shut your goddamn mouth.”

“Make me.” Zito grabbed at Mulder’s arm so that Mulder would snatch his hand and pin it down, bearing down on Zito’s throat with a blanketing heat, a silvery fuzz. He gasped. “Go on and make me.”

Shock bolted for a second on Mulder’s face, but before he could respond, Hudson was hauling him off, wrenching them apart and laying into both of them at once. Zito rubbed his neck and watched Mulder watching him, no guilt in Mulder’s expression but instead a resentful fascination.

Hudson said with his voice cracking badly, “You’re not gonna leave things all fucked up, I won’t let you,” and Zito thought about how one of them at least would never wear white in this stadium again, and maybe Hudson hadn’t really registered that yet. Zito wanted to go down swinging, wanted to walk out of here with bruises on his face, something of Mulder’s that he could take with him like a button off Chavez’s jersey.

It was over, though, it was done. Hudson still had his hand on Zito’s chest, holding him back, and Zito closed his eyes, thinking, another year, another year on the skid, another year worse than the one that came before.

*

In December, Zito was watching a soccer game on ESPN Deportes, whiling away the afternoon with slow cans of beer and games of solitaire that he had to cheat at to win. Small simple tasks, rote games were the best for keeping his mind away from actively waiting for the phone call that would tell him he was the property of another team.

He tried to work through it rationally, sitting on the carpet with the patterned red-black ladders of cards stretching before him, not listening to the commentary because he only understood about a tenth of it. There had been a series of events leading up to this most unendurable of all winters, a number of fallen dominoes that he hadn’t recognized as clues.

He’d known the A’s were a small-market team when he’d signed with them, but no twenty-one year old kid had the foresight to appreciate what that really meant, this endless succession of departing players, the constant abandonment. Nobody ever played for the same team their whole career anymore, but other teams weren’t gutted and rebuilt every four years, either.

Zito tried to tally them up, the ones who’d left, shipped out or lured away by the bright lights and enormous sweepstakes checks of free agency, but he lost count almost immediately, his memory suffused. Adam and Frankie and Izzy and T-Long, Jason Giambi pantsing his little brother while Jeremy was giving an interview, David Justice who never told them anything good about Halle Berry, Billy Koch and Billy Mac, Olmedo and F.P. and Miggy, Mark Bellhorn and Johnny Damon and Keith Foulke, all of whom had just won the World Series. The Oakland A’s of the unreachable past, a ghost team the ranks of which would soon include Barry Zito.

The phone rang.

Zito went perfectly still, feeling time screech to a halt like an old record. His mind raffled with a mash of team names, _metscubsoriolesdodgers_ , bounding across the country as he pictured himself in each stadium, in the rain and the snow, places where the ocean was on the wrong side.

But it was Tim Hudson, and Zito let out a shuddering breath, curling forward over his knees and pressing the phone to his ear.

“Hey, Timmy.”

“Kid,” Hudson said, his voice weird and strangled.

“Are you okay?”

“You. Fuck. _Fuck_ , kid.”

A frozen tail of fear snaked in Zito’s stomach, every word out of Hudson’s mouth so tattered and tortured. He shook his head unconsciously, thinking that it couldn’t be, no way.

“What’s wrong, Tim, what’s going on?” Zito asked, all urgent and terrified, no calm spot left in him.

Hudson made a low rough sound like a bootscrape on cement, and told him, “I’m a fuckin’ Brave now.”

No way, Zito thought again, no possible _chance_ , not Tim Hudson. Billy Beane was too close an incarnation of Spartacus, too smart to have let Hudson go. Hudson with his vicious diving splitters, an assassin of ankles, Hudson was the one Beane should have kept, that was obvious. Hudson was the better pitcher. He was the better man; he looked out for all of them.

“No,” Zito said, hearing as if from afar the conversational tone in his voice and finding it remarkable. He felt like he was disintegrating on the inside.

Hudson cut off a moan. “Yeah. I don’t, I can’t even fucking _think_ about it.”

“No,” Zito said again, his mind motionless, desperately trying not to absorb what Hudson was saying.

“Kid,” Hudson said, and then he kinda lost it, moved the phone away but Zito could still hear him crying, and it was the worst thing he’d ever heard, Tim Hudson breaking down, Tim Hudson 2500 miles away and there he would remain.

Zito hung up, panic surging through him. He slammed out of denial, the brunt force of realization knocking him back. Hudson was gone. He’d never be around to defy Zito’s troubles with dirty jokes and made-up rules for redneck darts, never again get Zito drunk on cheap beer and make him laugh so hard he cried.

Never again would Hudson jump onto Zito’s back in the melee after a walk-off homerun, the warm solid weight of him pushing Zito further into his team and Hudson’s scratchy face rasping on his neck for a second, Hudson’s joyful voice echoing in his ear. It was something Hudson did every time they won on one swing—Zito couldn’t imagine the rocketing glory of the moment without him.

Zito got the hell out of there. He left the television on and maybe the front door open, he couldn’t be sure. The only thing he stopped to do was write his sister a note, having spent all winter assuring her that he was fine, he didn’t need a hug. He couldn’t see her now, couldn’t see anybody. This was bad enough without a witness.

His phone rang again and again as he got in his car and drove. At first, it was Hudson, probably thinking that they got cut off, not knowing Zito for the coward he truly was. Eventually, Hudson stopped calling and the reporters started.

He chucked his phone out the window on the freeway, saw it demolished under the thunder of oncoming traffic. It was just a whim after two hours of nonstop calls, the phone’s vibrate dance jigging and rattling away in the coin tray, just an instant of overwhelming fear and frustration, but once the phone was gone it seemed like a pretty dumb thing to have done.

Zito got to the outskirts of the city, the steady desertification of the landscape, before it occurred to him that he didn’t really want to run away. An alien city wouldn’t help his desolation or sense of violent abandonment, and it would probably be cold there, too. It was too extreme. Zito just needed a place to hide.

He’d kept his apartment on the edge of West Hollywood even after moving in with Sally during the off-seasons, a supposed refuge that he really only used to throw louder parties than she would tolerate. He hadn’t told any of his family that he was still paying rent on it because it didn’t work as a secret hideout if people knew where it was.

It was perfect, the only place he wanted to be. Crummy little fourth floor walk-up with pipes that rattled all night and ran rusty brown water for ten seconds before turning clear, bald carpet revealing floorboards that sank and moaned with every step, and Zito’d never appreciated it as well as he did now.

He got a week’s worth of food at the bodega, a bunch of movies from the video store, and paged his weed guy from the pay phone, arranging the drop off of a half-ounce and skins in a variety of sizes. He got a sole full of splinters ten minutes after taking off his shoes and was hobbled, had two guys come out to replace the carpet while he drank on the fire escape, and then didn’t see another human being for awhile. He holed up.

Living like a fugitive complemented and deepened Zito’s misery, which had largely been the point. He wanted to go through the mourning process in private, couldn’t stand to have himself immortalized in this condition, captured forever on paper and electrons. In a couple of days, he’d be over the worst of it and ready to face his remaining teammates and his family and the sports media.

But then just two days after Hudson had been traded, before Zito had even gotten the bleeding under control, he was flipping through channels when he caught a glimpse of Mulder’s face in a still photograph, but something was wrong with it, a jarring moment of disconnect that only just registered.

Zito went back—it’d been ESPN, of course.

There was nothing wrong with Mulder’s face. There was something very wrong with what he was wearing, though, because it wasn’t green or gold and was instead a Cardinals uniform.

And the anchor was saying, “When asked, Billy Beane would neither confirm nor deny reports that he is also seeking suitors for his sole remaining ace, Barry Zito.”

It wasn’t like Hudson, didn’t feel like a dismemberment in the same way, more like taking a stray fastball to the back of the head, a blow that vanished sense and memory and was briefly, blessedly painless, blank as new snow. All Zito could do was stare at the poorly photoshopped picture of Mulder in those sanguine colors, thinking on a rote loop, I’ve known him for years.

Eight years this summer, actually, and this wasn’t even the first time Zito had seen Mulder in red, because the Bourne Braves of the Cape Cod Baseball League had worn white uniforms with maraschino-colored piping and caps. Zito could suddenly remember opening Mulder’s jersey like a present, fingertips skidding and jumping as Mulder sprawled back on a twin bed breathing hard, his smooth narrow chest trembling and the flush spreading down his neck. Zito remembered tracing the brim of Mulder’s cap along his collarbone and telling Mulder that his skin was the exact same color, remembered Mulder stuttering for him to shut up, lacing his hands behind Zito’s neck and pulling him down for a bruising kiss.

It hit Zito then, a spear of lucidity that took the wind out of his lungs, flattened him. His life for the better part of a decade had revolved around baseball and three men, the three chapters of his youth. He’d lost Chavez and had Mulder and Hudson stolen away, and it no longer mattered if Zito got traded too; he was going to be alone next year anyway.

*

Zito did a good job staying stoned and drunk for much of the next few days. The universe reduced down to the short shoebox of the living room, cramped dining area at the end of the strip of kitchen, his cell of a bedroom, and Zito paced out every angle, mapped the cracks in the walls and the water stains yellowing the ceiling.

In the world outside, phones were ringing and people were looking for him, thinking worse of him the longer he went without contacting anyone. Zito had lost track of how long he’d been gone. He had trouble telling day from night, the plots of the movies and television shows melting together, but even the amorphous uncertainty of time and place was better than opening his door to the clamoring storm.

There was a single bizarre benefit to the whole mess, and that was Eric Chavez, who’d always been the best interview on the team and didn’t disappoint now. The rest of the team provided stock interchangeable answers about the trades, but Chavez’s quotes seethed, fumed and spat and demanded an explanation for the calamity that had befallen them. Zito read Chavez’s bits over and over again, closing his eyes to capture the coarse insistence in Chavez’s voice, the wicked black flash of his eyes when he lit into something with all his power.

Chavez wasn’t helping the team by second-guessing Billy Beane, wasn’t helping himself by publicly decrying something he couldn’t change, but Zito didn’t care. It was terrible, but he found himself hoping that Chavez’s heart would continue to break so loudly that Zito could hear it three hundred miles away.

But he got something even better, one night while he was watching Andy Warhol’s _Dracula_ , alternately turned on and grossed out, which he thought was probably the intention. He’d been drinking for a number of hours, unsure how late it was because he hadn’t been able to find his watch for days, blunted and bloodshot when someone pounded on the door three times.

Zito twisted, peeking over the back of the couch and blindly muting the television, thinking that it must be the cops, cops or one of the junkies down the hall asking to borrow a lighter again. Zito’s mouth pressed against the rough plaid weave of the upholstery, a dusty taste as the pounding came again.

He got up to answer it, steeling himself for human contact and not at all expecting to find Eric Chavez standing in the hallway looking ten years older than the last time Zito saw him, lines spiderwebbing faintly at the corners of his eyes, his lower lip chapped and ragged. Zito was benumbed, nothing registering on his face even as his mind skipped and jammed, Chavez so incongruous and clean-looking, so badly missed. It hurt to see him for a hundred different reasons.

“You still pay for this piece-of-shit place?” Chavez asked, shadowy eyes locked on Zito.

Zito leaned on his shoulder against the doorjamb, grateful for the support. “It’s hardly an extravagance. And it’s worth it, you know, two apartments in one city.”

“Can I come in?”

“Oh sure,” Zito said, letting some sarcasm color his voice because he didn’t know what else to do but run him off, scared to look at Chavez or be in the same room with him right now because both their defenses were completely engaged on other fronts. “How fuckin’ rude of me, make yourself at home. No shoes, though, it’s a rule because of the very nice carpet.”

Leaving Chavez in the foyer with the door standing open, Zito disappeared back into the living room, one hand flat over his heart as if to press it back into place. He wasn’t ready for this.

Chavez came in and stood for a moment taking in the flicker-lit room, Zito huddled on the couch holding a can of beer protectively with both hands. Somebody died bloody and screaming in the movie, Zito staring like he’d had to sneak into the theater, anything to avoid looking at Chavez.

“Um, excuse me,” Chavez said. “But what the fuck are you doing?”

Zito swallowed, answering with a nod at the TV, “It’s Warhol, it’s really fucked up.”

“Okay, whatever,” Chavez said impatiently, flipped the lights on and Zito shrunk back, tried not to hiss but he’d seen too many vampire movies recently and he couldn’t help it. “Dude.”

“What?” You’ve done nothing wrong, he’s got no right, Zito reminded himself, not feeling especially convincing. “Go ahead, you came all this way.”

“Somebody had to come find you,” Chavez told him, and that woke Zito up a little, slow tide of anger rising.

“And what, you, you lost the coin flip, right? That’s great, Chavvy, fuckin’ thrilled to see you too.”

Zito killed his beer and his arm moved of its own volition, hard scythe cut that had once dazzled the world and now Zito couldn’t even hit the window he’d aimed at, the can bouncing off right under. Red wash across his eyes like shame and regret, trying not to stare at the glint of gold flashing as Chavez pushed his hand through his hair.

Ballplayers don’t wear their wedding rings at the ballpark or on the road, and Zito couldn’t actually remember if he’d ever seen Chavez’s. This might be the first concrete proof.

“Sorry if I interrupted your little fucking vacation,” Chavez said acidly, obviously enjoying this no more than Zito was. “But I’m getting a little tired of promising your mom that you’re okay.”

That was a direct hit and caused Zito to look up at Chavez with naked pain etched on his features. Chavez’s face fell for half a second, his mouth weak and unsure, but then he got himself back under control, his angles going taut.

“So why don’t you just come home?” he said, dangerously soft. “You should hear what those fuckers are saying about you. Saying this is what it’ll be like with them gone, you just disappearing whenever we need you. Everybody else is already over it.”

Zito surprised them both by laughing once, harsh sound more like a cough, and he curled his lip, wishing to feel meaner than he did.

“Right, I’m so fucking sure,” Zito said fast, holding tight to anger because anger was easier. “You look real over it to me, dude.”

Chavez jerked his head, glaring at Zito. “You won’t even talk to anybody.”

“Who am I supposed to talk to?” Zito asked, horrified to hear his voice crack. “There’s only two people in the world who know what this feels like, and I, I can’t talk to Hudson because it’d be terrible, and I don’t. I’ve never really liked Mulder.”

His hands were in fists, tight enough to draw blood, and Zito pressed his wrists against his face. He wasn’t even sure if he was lying anymore, his memory made chaotic, shredded by grief.

“The truth finally comes out,” Chavez said, sounding tired and as if he’d been waiting for Zito to admit it for years.

“It’s mostly because he doesn’t like me, though,” Zito told him, but that wasn’t quite true either. Zito’s face twisted, hating the disorientation, the appalling thought that the only thing he knew for sure anymore was that he had once loved Eric Chavez. “Fuck.”

There was a long moment of silence, Zito actively fighting to keep from dwelling on the merciless wreck of the night. He summoned baseball, a panacea of green fields and blue skies, but it only made him think about next year, when he and Chavez would be the living memory of their team, the last faded remnants of their ill-starred dynasty.

Just you and me, he thought, giving Chavez a long look from under his lowered eyelashes. Chavez was forcibly relaxing, stretching his hands open and pulling his lower lip through his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut and then blinking open. You and me, and you haven’t changed a bit.

Zito pushed the back of his hand across his face, obscuring a stray tear. Two more years until free agency, two more years smiling at the cameras and quietly dying for Chavez, two more years and then the heartless world would have him. Zito couldn’t tell which would be worse.

“They’ve just always been here, you know,” he said eventually, wooden to his own ears, poor excuses. “Everything else is different.”

“Yeah,” Chavez said, absent and sad. Zito snuck a look and found Chavez staring at him with the strangest expression, this sort of heated fondness mixed with despair.

That look on Chavez’s face did bad things to Zito, called up an old sleepy turn in his stomach, and he bowed his head, flushing deeply. He tried to suppress it, but he and Chavez had not been alone in a room together in the longest time, and Zito couldn’t help the flood of images, all the other empty rooms, the doors and walls he’d had Chavez pressed up against, the perfect tar-black of underground ballpark equipment closets, hushed and quick and desperate, never having enough time.

Zito didn’t hear Chavez approaching, didn’t notice until Chavez closed his hand in Zito’s shirt at the shoulder, making Zito jump under his skin, yank his head up. Chavez looked kinda confused and surprised at himself, but he said:

“Settle down. I’m not doing anything.”

Zito stared up at him, trying as hard as he could not to move because Chavez’s thumb was on his throat, maybe he didn’t even realize it but he was touching Zito again.

“Yeah?” Zito asked, and Chavez shrugged, arresting Zito’s gaze with his own, refusing to let him look away.

“Nothing you have to worry about,” Chavez told him, his voice becoming low and rough and not fair at all.

But Zito didn’t believe him, knew Chavez well enough to know what was on his mind right now, those wide black eyes and eager mouth, the way he was angling closer in the smallest increments, one leg sneaking between Zito’s own. Zito felt a smile start to curl his mouth, an ingrained reaction because Chavez had never looked at him like that without making good on it, an honest cruise.

It devastated him, a crushing blow because Zito had never wanted anybody like he wanted Chavez at the moment, and even if it happened, even if it was already inevitable, it would only make things worse in the morning. Zito gave a fleeting thought to his addictive personality, his eternal willingness to sacrifice tomorrow for the better of today, and he knew he would have sex with Chavez tonight even if it meant they never spoke to each other again.

“You’re just, I don’t know,” Zito said, keeping his voice quiet and coarse. “It’s probably not the best time.”

Chavez’s throat moved as he gave the smallest nod, his thumb stroking on Zito’s neck, a recurring curve of tracing heat that made Zito dizzy. Chavez was biting his lip, his eyebrows tipped helplessly upwards, standing so close now that Zito could see the anxious jumps of the pulse under his jaw.

“I thought it’d be you,” Chavez said in a whisper, and slid his hand up Zito’s neck into his hair, a full-body shiver as Chavez’s fingers curled and found their old home cradling the base of Zito’s skull.

Zito nodded, hitching a hand in Chavez’s belt, and told him, “So did I,” before pulling him down, feeling fortifications and ramparts crumble as he wrapped his arms around Chavez once more.

Chavez made a sound like a moan in the instant before his mouth met Zito’s, and it was deep and open and crazy immediately, Chavez straddling Zito’s body and pressing against him so hard Zito could feel Chavez’s shirt buttons digging in through his own shirt. Chavez had both hands buried in Zito’s hair, tilting his head perfectly and licking into Zito’s mouth, same edged fresh-water taste, same sparks everywhere they were skin to skin.

First time in better than two years, and a beautiful thought bloomed in Zito’s mind, they had all night, Chavez had come to join him in exile and no one knew where they were. They could go fast this time and call it taking the edge off, and Chavez was two steps ahead, already scrabbling at Zito’s pajama pants, fingers tangling in the drawstring and brushing hard against him, making Zito gasp and twist closer.

Bare hands and Chavez’s jeans just open enough, expert roughness like in the very first fantasies Zito had ever had about him, and Chavez was babbling between raw biting kisses, saying more and please and c’mon and all the usual maddening stuff. He had both hands working Zito, pushing his cheek and mouthing against the side of Zito’s face, the slick edge of his neck, and Chavez was saying, “never forgot a thing.”

They finished one right after the other too close to call, panting into each other’s mouths, and fell back on the couch in one slumped form, Chavez’s breath in the hollow under Zito’s collarbone, warming the riot of his pulse.

Twenty-seven months like it was nothing, Zito thought, reeling and beset with aftershock tremors. Chavez felt the exact same, fit against him as well as ever, his solid chest and Zito’s long arms, the way he scraped his chin across Zito’s shoulder every so often. A sense memory like the scent of grass and suntan lotion and rosin chalk, the weight of Chavez on him and the familiar bend of his rib cage under Zito’s hands, like no time had passed at all.

Zito lifted Chavez’s head off his shoulder, gave him a long kiss before laying him down on the couch. Chavez grinned up at him, the corner of his lip starting to swell. Zito pushed both hands up under Chavez’s shirt, flat run of muscle and Chavez shivering, arching into it, his neck stretching out and Zito had to look away, ducking his head and opening his mouth on Chavez’s stomach.

Zito screwed his eyes shut, not sure if he was tasting the salt of Chavez’s skin or an escaped tear. It was unendurable, a suffocating inward collapse to realize that there’d been no point to the misery of the past two years, no recovery to speak of and no light ahead.

You’ve got tonight, he thought, it’s not over yet, and then Chavez was pulling at his hair, dragging Zito up his body to fuse their mouths together again, and Zito wasn’t thinking about anything else.

*

They slept a couple hours on the floor in front of the couch, Zito’s head on Chavez’s chest with his T-shirt blanketed across his shoulders, and were woken up by white winter sunlight, sheens of sweat on their bodies providing no resistance to hands. Chavez prodded him up and got them both down the hallway to the bedroom with Zito’s arm draped over his chest from behind, Zito’s heavy head lolling in the bow of Chavez’s neck.

Slower, that last time, slowest of all the times, dawn painting the room and Chavez guiding Zito, placing his hands and rolling him over, Chavez telling him in hoarse whispers that it was okay and he was doing great, so great. Zito thought there was something wrong with Chavez’s voice, something strange about the way Chavez kept swiping at his eyes and smiling, but Zito couldn’t focus on it, wrapped up in a building unmeasured ache, half-asleep and breathing in the best dream he’d ever had.

They fell asleep again afterwards, lying at an acute angle with Chavez’s legs kicked over Zito’s, and Zito woke up first, blinking awake into the full blast of the afternoon light.

Chavez had rolled away from him, managed to somehow turn himself all the way around and now had his foot jamming a pillow against the headboard, his head half-buried in the mash of comforter at the end. Zito crawled around so they were similarly aligned, laid his head down and watched Chavez from a few inches away.

Haven’t changed a bit, Zito thought again, and maybe it was just all the misuse Zito’s memory had sustained, but when he closed his eyes and drew up the picture of Chavez sitting on the carpet in a nest of videogame cords and controllers five years ago, it didn’t look any different than the man sleeping in his bed now. The lines and shadows were smoothed out by this kind Californian light, the decades lived under desert suns, the small chips that Zito had taken out of Chavez’s grin, none of it marred his face anymore, none of it showed at all.

“Chavvy,” Zito said under his breath. Chavez was asleep, his eyelids twitching minutely, and Zito hovered his hand above Chavez’s cheek, seeing how close he could get without touching.

“Chavvy,” he said again even quieter, and closed his eyes, bowed his head.

In an hour or two Chavez was going to wake up and they were going to have coffee together before Chavez left to go back to his wife, and Zito knew that that was going to happen. He knew how Chavez would look, awful collision of guilt and contentment and helplessness, and he knew he’d say something he didn’t really mean to make it easier for Chavez, let him go without a fight.

Zito knew exactly how it would go down. He might have lived this moment a hundred times, waiting for Chavez to wake up and smile at him and roll away, the smooth curve of his shoulder slipping under Zito’s hand, a jeweled vision of the future so much clearer than the past had ever been.

Zito moved glacially until his forehead barely touched Chavez’s, and told him without voice or breath, “Whatever happens, you still have me.”

*

So that’s what happened. And this is how it is now:

They’re teammates for another two years. It’s never really okay, but they cover well.

Zito is trade bait almost the entire time and never again the best pitcher on the staff, outshone by Rich Harden’s four or five historically brilliant starts a season, Joe Blanton plugging along striking out a half-dozen guys a game without fanfare, and the ascendance of Danny Haren.

It should be humbling but instead it gouges at Zito, rips him up on the inside because he has given his whole life to pitch in the big leagues and now suddenly he can’t. He goes through stretches when the curve falls and the change floats and the slider masquerades, spins like a top across the corners, but these are rarer as time goes on. Very slowly, incrementally, he’s losing velocity. Months go by when he never breaks ninety, and then it’s eighty-nine, eighty-eight, a timebomb with a decade-long clock.

Zito feels like he’s being siphoned, drained milliliter by milliliter, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do when his fastball is finally too slow to stay out of the bleachers. Everything is based around the fastball, all the other pitches just variation and deception. It’d be easier to pitch without his pinky finger than without his fastball, and Zito can see it decaying, eaten away; he doesn’t want to think the word cancer but maybe that’s what it feels like.

Chavez starts getting hurt more often, but so does everybody else. The difference is that Chavez always says he can play through it when they ask, and too often, they let him. He plays in pain for weeks, small white spots pressed into the corners of his mouth, and Zito watches his posture changing as the back spasms become more frequent, constant wearied grimace on his face. He lies on the floor in the clubhouse and airports, narrow bus aisles and hotel lobbies, takes white pills for the pain and Zito doesn’t know how much he’s sleeping but it really doesn’t seem like enough.

Zito worries about him, but he can’t talk because even though he’s not hurt, he’s certainly not right. In a disquieting way, almost nothing is right anymore.

The team gets along without the two of them, for the most part. In 2005 nobody expects them to be good, but then they are. In 2006, everyone expects them to be good, and they are. In the winter it rains, and in the summer the winds come, on and on.

Zito and Chavez have some rules, an unspoken accord that groups are okay but never just the two of them, never alone in an empty room, and they hold by it fairly well. Possibly as compensation, they stand too close when the guys are bunched up listening to the coaches, they share a row on the plane, both wearing headphones and ignoring the other, they sit together at the round table at the back of the clubhouse sometimes, silently watching their team.

Zito saves this stuff up. It’s all that’s been left him.

There are only two other times, the end of their history.

The first time is nothing, just both of them stupid-tired and drunk and staggering out of the bar, the other guys left to argue over the tab, the bloodless hard-black sky chilling something in Zito. Chavez ducks around the corner to take a leak, a flash of pale forehead and soft tarry hair, and Zito follows him without really knowing what he’s doing, cold on the inside and drawn to Chavez like a moth.

Chavez is surprised to see him, glancing back over his shoulder at the scrape of Zito’s shoes, and the edged angle of his eye glints, his lips parting. A ratcheting feeling in Zito’s chest, like he’s being hiked up, jerked closer, and he’s moving towards Chavez, thread-thin cracks in the bricks and Chavez breathing out, “hey,” but not like he wants Zito to stop.

It’s so stupid. Just a Tuesday night late in 2006, nothing riding on it but how bad they’ll feel in the morning. Zito’s too drunk and he has a hand clenched in Chavez’s hair, keeping his head pulled back, mouthing down his throat. He feels terrible already, choked needy sounds and Chavez pushing back against him, braced on his arm against the wall. Chavez is kinda wild and his eyes have this dead look to them and Zito would stop if he could but no, no. He gets Chavez off with his teeth sunk into Chavez’s shoulder, Chavez panting and writhing and clawing, rust-colored brick dust under his nails, and for some reason it hits Zito just as hard, charges through him like an overdose. He reels away, almost gets sick against the other wall, his mind roaring and his sticky hands shaking.

When he looks back around Chavez is gone.

The next day they pretend like nothing happened, like the purpled crescent-moon impression of Zito’s teeth isn’t visible on Chavez’s shoulder, and after a week the bruise has faded and Zito can’t be sure of his own soused memories, dreaming every night of Chavez’s rough cheek and the tangle of his hair around Zito’s fingers.

Zito is twenty-eight years old, dead certain that his best is already behind him. Chavez isn’t the epic love of his life like Zito once thought, or maybe he was and Zito’s just a tragic kind of hero. He doesn’t waste time trying to fix the many things that are wrong with him, these days. This is the man he is now—it doesn’t matter how he got here.

The second time, the very last, is a couple of years after that, after Zito has signed his free agent contract and moved across the bay to San Francisco, after Chavez misses all the previous season with back problems and crippling stress headaches. Zito has already been a tremendous disappointment to everyone, and Chavez has become something of an afterthought most of the way through his own extension.

It’s totally random. They haven’t spoken in four months, not since Zito came over to Mark Ellis’s house party right before the season started. Zito has been drowning all year. Nothing is as he thought it would be; he’s thirty years old and he barely even recognizes what he’s doing as pitching, it’s become so joyless and tortured. He doesn’t hate it yet because he was raised so well, but he can sense it coming like black rain before hail.

Streets of San Francisco, somewhere down by the ballpark in the wrecking wind and the orange-colored light, and Zito’s drunk, chucking rocks into the cove to explode amid the white flashes on the waves. His phone is ringing and ringing, blaring worse than an air raid in Zito’s fragile echoey brain, and he almost throws it too, stills his hand long enough to see Chavez’s name on the display.

An hour past midnight, and they haven’t spoken in four months, and Zito stares across the bay searching for the Coliseum but the fog is in and the lights aren’t on, anyway, it’s invisible.

Zito answers, his throat and chest aching tight, and Chavez is drunk too, drunk like Zito hasn’t seen him in years, slurring and dropping words and forgetting to talk for long moments. He calls Zito babe over and over again, almost pleading, and he’s somewhere in this city, stranded and alone.

Zito manages to get cross streets from him and finds a cab, flying through the chrome and glass into the sewn-up neighborhoods and the corner bar where Chavez is sitting on the curb with his head in his hands, white T-shirt limned silver in the moonlight over the shell-like curve of his back.

And Chavez doesn’t remember the year.

He clings to Zito on the sidewalk, hands wrapped up in Zito’s shirt and his eyes whirring, his mouth running nonstop. He presses his face against Zito’s neck, hot and dry and Zito’s heart almost stops.

Chavez says, “Let’s go back to your place,” and Zito pushes him up against the wall, weirdly terrified.

Chavez only smiles at him, reaches up to touch Zito’s hand on his chest, hooking his fingers over Zito’s wrist. Zito shivers, wide-eyed and swallowing hard, and Chavez laughs a little bit, his tired eyes dark and soft at the corners, lost in the past.

“It’s not so far, man, we got time,” Chavez tells him, swaying forward and Zito closes his eyes, hearing Chavez chant under his breath, “we got time, we got time,” quieter and quieter until he cut himself off by kissing Zito.

They neck in the back of the cab all the way to Zito’s place, and then Zito realizes through the dense red haze that they can’t go upstairs because at some point Chavez is going to remember and Zito is not going to watch him leave again.

He takes Chavez into the parking garage under the building and they get in the backseat of Zito’s car, Chavez grinning and humming and sliding his hands under Zito’s clothes, telling him how good it’s going to be.

Zito kisses him to keep him quiet, something breaking inside every time Chavez says his name, says please.

Zito is trying not to think about a half an hour from now, when he’ll put Chavez in a cab and send him home to his wife. He’s trying not to think about tomorrow morning, when Chavez will wake up sick and miserable and hating them both, the procession of silent months and years ahead until Zito’s love for Chavez is as weathered and diminished as his talent, all the remarkable things he once was.

This is the last chance Zito will ever have, but he’s not thinking about that either, locked in Chavez’s arms and trying to hold just one word in his mind, trying to believe it: _time_.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> What happened was, I decided 'Back in the Day' and 'Eric Chavez Goes to Hollywood' (two stories I wrote a couple years apart) took place in the same universe, starring the same Zito--this primarily because of a throwaway line at the end of 'Eric Chavez Goes to Hollywood' where Zito is said to own a blue raincoat that is slightly too bit for him. Because Zito was not the POV character in either of those stories, I rewrote both from his perspective. Hence, 'In the Here and Now' and 'The Kid from Hollywood.'


End file.
